The FTC has not adequately considered the costs that its proposed Children’s...

two dozen changes to the 11-year-old rule that seeks to shield children from sexual predators, invasive marketing, and other online threats. A gaming industry representative derided the commission’s offer to eliminate the current “sliding scale” or “email plus” approach to parental consent. Adopted in 1999, the sliding scale approach requires operators who are collecting personal information for internal use to obtain parental consent through an email and one additional step that verifies the individual is actually the child’s parent. But doing away with the approach would force existing COPPA-compliant companies to incur expensive costs and raises serious questions about how to implement an alternative approach, panelists said. “Realistically it would cost us $12 million per year to do away with the email plus system,” said Rebecca Newton, chief community and safety officer of Mind Candy, an online gaming company that caters to children. “For any of the large businesses we get 70,000 registrations per day and 100,000 per day on weekends. Twenty-five percent of the 70,000 will drop off because they don’t want to submit their Social Security number,” Newton said. But the sliding scale approach is something that “has long been recognized as an unreliable method,” said Phyllis Marcus, a staff attorney in the enforcement division at the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The time has come to let this method go.” Newton disagreed, saying that it would be better to improve the email plus approach “rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”