FTC Endorses Age Verification Technology
The Federal Trade Commission said this week that web companies won’t violate the children’s privacy law by collecting personal information from young children in order to determine their ages, provided the companies don’t use the data for other purposes and meet some additional security requirements.
The agency explicitly said its new policy aims to encourage businesses to use age verification technology, adding that some verification technology is more reliable than companies’ current methods of determining users’ ages.
“Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades,” Christopher Mufarrige, head of the agency’s consumer protection division, stated. “Our statement incentivizes operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online.”
Related Knowledge Center: Media and the law
Toxic politics and vast shifts in the technology landscape have created a plethora of thorny issues — both legal and ethical — for newsrooms, courts, and regulators.
The Meta-FTC trial | Section 230
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance