FTC to Expedite Review of Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
The FTC said Wednesday it will speed up the regulatory review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule with an eye on whether the rule should be modified to address changes in the wireless marketplace, brought on by a new generation of smartphones and other advances in technology. The review of the rule was supposed to get under way in 2015 but will start instead next year, the FTC said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Release of the report was announced at a symposium sponsored by CTIA and the Family Online Safety Institute. The gathering examined the increasingly complex online safety issues confronting parents, wireless carriers and government at all levels. Speakers at the conference highlighted a growing list of challenges, such as “sexting” where teens send indecent photos of themselves to friends. The photos can be used maliciously, for example sent to others after teens break up.
FTC Commissioner Pamela Harbour said the agency has already taken “substantial” enforcement actions tied to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which was approved by Congress in 1998. The FTC also plans to use the federal government’s OnGuard Online program as a “launching pad” for a nationwide education effort on online safety for children, as required by the recently enacted Broadband Data Improvement Act.
“The issues raised by these new interactions are as complex as the technologies themselves,” Harbour said during a keynote at the conference. “While there can be many benefits to new technologies there can also be, as we know, unintended consequences.” Harbour encouraged interested parties to work together. “Only through engagement and encouragement can we work together to identify areas of concern and where necessary to develop solutions,” she said.
“I've been at CTIA now going on my sixth year,” said President Steve Largent, who opened the conference. “This has been a top priority for me, personally, as it was when I was a member of Congress. We will continue this work, continue this effort, continue working with community groups across this country that are also looking to protect children from predatory behavior.”
Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler warned that sex offenders have already figured out how to use the Internet for wrongdoing. “They're so far ahead of where we are in law enforcement that we need to do catch up,” Gansler said. He said one problem is that online crimes often slip through the cracks. “We can do a lot legislatively and we do,” he said, but enforcement is just as critical. Local district attorneys’ major concern is “street crime -- rapes, murders, arson, burglaries and so forth,” he said. Federal law enforcement officers “are properly and naturally focused on homeland security issues … So there’s a huge gap in the law enforcement world on the Internet.” State attorneys general often have to fill the void. “We would like to work with the wireless companies and those in the wireless industry,” Gansler said. “It’s important. It makes sense for everybody.”
Georgia state Sen. Don Balfour (R), president-elect of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said states have looked at online safety issues very carefully and most have laws that make it illegal to use the Internet to lure children for the commission of a crime. Seven states mandate online safety education in the schools and 46 have cyberstalking laws.
But Balfour said practices such as “sexting” point to how complicated many online safety issues are. “You struggle to work through these things,” he said. “When two people at 13 do something they're not supposed to do, I hesitate to charge them with a crime, personally. I hesitate to all of a sudden make them sex offenders … Now there are other examples where the girl sends a picture to the boy and they break up and he sends it to 100 of his best friends in the school. That’s a different case.”
In addition to committing to a faster exam of its online safety rule, the FTC said in a written statement that cost disclosures about wireless services continue to generate consumer complaints. “The FTC staff will continue to monitor cost disclosures, bring law enforcement actions as appropriate, and work with industry on improving its self-regulatory enforcement,” the agency said.
The FTC also warned that while spyware and malware are not a major concern to date for wireless Internet, they could become so as smartphones grow in popularity. “The FTC and its law enforcement partners should continue to monitor the impact on consumers of unwanted mobile text messages, malware, and spyware, and take law enforcement action as needed,” the agency said. “Wireless carriers currently block hundreds of millions of unsolicited text messages every month. The cost to the carriers is substantial, but the cost to consumers of receiving voluminous amounts of unwanted text messages would be far greater.”
Panelists cautioned that regulations might not be the best means to improve online safety. They urged more transparency in service providers’ privacy policies and more clarity in state and federal privacy laws. Sprint Nextel’s online safety approach focuses on offering choices to parents on the level of access and education programs, said Ed Palmieri, deputy chief privacy officer. Teaming with online safety groups and law enforcement agencies is critical for service providers, he said. Though sharing similar principles, carriers seemed to have different safety approaches, he said. As a result, having policy and regulations might not work for every carrier, he noted.
Having a consistent policy across different media platforms is important, said Jack McArtney, Verizon’s associate director of advertising and content standards. A key for online safety is about making all the information and tools available for consumers, he said. A big challenge for law enforcement agencies is the knowledge gap between the offender and law enforcement agency, said Monique Roth of the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. Offenders are taking advantage of the gap, she noted, urging more funding for state-level enforcement agencies. On location-based service, the trick is making LBS easier to use while making sure customers know of the potential risk of disclosing location information and tools to avoid misuse of the service, said Palmieri.