When it comes to advertising to kids, the rules for the internet are fuzzier than the tightly regulated world of television, in large part because internet advertising itself is always changing.

As we near the turn of the year into 2015, organizations should keep an eye on laws taking effect on the West Coast. This year, the crop of new privacy

Talks about the CDA.

Join EFF on April 4th for 404 Day, a nation-wide day of action to call attention to the long-standing problem of Internet censorship in public libraries and public schools. In collaboration with the

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the enforcement of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which brought new levels of Internet censorship to libraries across the country. CIPA was

Report claims "significant discrepancy" between what apps say and what they do.

DCoded: New government rules on plugins look like a bad idea.

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

Gives history, including COPA.

Children are getting online at ever-younger ages these days, sometimes with sites like Facebook, and sometimes for school requirements. But did you know that many major online services, including those from Google, Apple, and Facebook, don’t allow children under 13 to join at all, thanks to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act? The end result is that parents are being forced to teach their children to lie online.

Digital media and learning scholars have long understood the importance of access when it comes to digital technologies.  Whether we’re talking about the digital divide or the participation gap, we all recognize that access is the first step.  Once we can assume access, we can talk about skills and digital literacy.  But access is still key. So what happens when children are systematically excluded from accessing digital media environments?  This, in many ways, is the conundrum resulting from how the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been implemented by many general-purpose communication platforms and social

Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social concerns, and technical issues, most general–purpose sites opt to restrict underage access through their ToS. Yet in spite of such restrictions, research suggests that millions of underage users circumvent this rule and sign up for accounts on Facebook. Given strong evidence of parental concern about children’s online activity, this raises questions of whether or not parents understand ToS restrictions for children, how they view children’s practices of circumventing age restrictions, and how they feel about children’s access being regulated. In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data. Our data have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.

A viral video uploaded to YouTube and parodied by South Park led to a lawsuit  …