Protecting gen Alpha

The risks to privacy start nearly at birth; in the United States, 92% of children aged two or younger have an online presence, according to security company AVG, because of “sharenting”—millennial parents sharing pictures on social media—leading to complexities when it comes to children’s right to privacy.

Lawmakers are attempting to get a handle on this changing state of digital connectivity by revisiting the 20-year-old Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The new version could include a stipulation that would let parents erase the data that companies have on their kids and extend the age of those protected by the act from 13 to 15.

“All this data makes kids uniquely valuable to companies and adds to their digital footprint, which can extend beyond parents’ control,” Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of non-profit Common Sense Media, argued at a US Senate committee hearing on data privacy for consumers, reported Fast Company. “Kids’ information will live on for longer than we know and could impact education and employment opportunities, healthcare access and exposure to identity theft.”

In the past year alone, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance, along with Google and YouTube, was fined for violating COPPA by selling young users’ data to third-party advertisers.

Tech giants are still navigating how to put parents at ease when it comes to their child’s digital footprint. Amazon’s answer has been to create a “safe space in a walled garden” across the kid-friendly versions of its smart devices. Its YouTube alternative Free Time is a curated subscription service with ad-free child-focused content and in September 2019, Amazon added new privacy features to its Echo Dot Kids Edition after it faced two lawsuits.

Facebook’s Messenger Kids tweaked its parental controls in February 2020 to help adults more easily manage their child’s privacy on the app, and updated its privacy policy to include more kid-friendly language and illustrations—but TechCrunch writer Sarah Perez cautioned “the policy leaves plenty of room for Facebook to collect private information and share it. If you have a Facebook account, you’ve already agreed to this sort of ‘deal with the devil’ for yourself in order to benefit from Facebook’s free service. But parents need to strongly consider if they’re comfortable making the same decision for their children.”