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Kids in the Know and the Association of Educational Publishers (EdPress) continued to work with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this month, as agency officials work to meet their October deadline for issuing final regulations governing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The final rules will have a major impact not only on existing children’s Web sites, but also on whether and how educational organizations and others develop sites in the future.
To write the rules, the FTC is using comments filed by dozens of organizations, testimony from a July public workshop, and other discussions with interested parties. The July hearing focused on ideas concerning various methods for obtaining "verifiable parental consent" for children’s Web sites that collect information from children under the age of 13, the centerpiece of COPPA, which was enacted last October. The workshop focused on the efficacy and cost of various parental-consent techniques.
Members of Kids in the Know and EdPress met with FTC staff August 11 to explain the latest developments in the educational uses of the Internet – in schools and the home – and why educators view interaction between children and certain Web sites to be educationally beneficial. The meeting participants also described how the Web can be used to provide additional educational resources to families and children, such as the magazines and books they and other Kids in the Know members publish.
Participating in the meeting were:
- Charlene Gaynor, EdPress;
- Keith Garton, TIME for Kids;
- Bob Harper, Cricket Magazines;
- Rich Ottum, Highlights for Children;
- Stephen Mico, National Geographic; and
- Kevin Bonderud, Kids in the Know.
The FTC staff were especially interested in considering how parental-consent requirements could be implemented in schools. Much of the discussion focused on whether and how blanket school-based Internet use agreements, increasingly used by schools, could serve to meet the parental-consent requirements. The publishers explained that teachers would be unable to secure parental-consent for each student for each Web site they wanted to use.
These concerns were underscored in a letter from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a Kids in the Know member. NCTE Executive Director Faith Schullstrom wrote that, "Requiring the teacher to make plans far enough in advance to obtain parental consent for every Web site to be used in the classroom places unnecessary constraints on the teacher." She said these constraints would "limit the opportunity for the teacher to capitalize on teachable moments and current events that have relevance in students’ lives."
The NCTE letter noted that "some of the most effective learning experiences are those that Continued on Page 2
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