Web Sites Accused of Collecting Data on Children

By
NATASHA SINGER

Published: August 22, 2012 15 Comments

The law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, requires Web site
operators to obtain verifiable consent from parents before collecting
personal information about children under age 13. But, in complaints to
the F.T.C., the coalition says six popular Web sites aimed at children
have violated that law by encouraging children who play brand-related
games or engage in other activities to provide friends’ e-mail addresses
— without seeking prior parental consent.

At least one company, however, said the accusation mischaracterized its
practices, adding that the law allows an exception for one-time use of a
friend’s e-mail address. As of late Tuesday, the companies said they
had not received copies of the complaints. Obtaining information about
adults’ social networks to e-mail marketing messages to their friends is
a common industry practice called “tell a friend” or “refer a friend.”
But now an increasing number of children’s sites are using the technique
by inviting children to make customized videos promoting certain
products, for example, and then sending them to friends.

The sites cited by the advocacy groups include McDonald’s HappyMeal.com; Nick.com, the Nickelodeon site owned by Viacom; General Mills’ ReesesPuffs.com; SubwayKids.com; another General Mills site, TrixWorld.com; and Turner’s CartoonNetwork.com.

“It really shows that companies are doing an end run around a law put in
place to protect children’s privacy,” said Laura Moy, a lawyer for the
Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington that led
the complaints. “Under the law, they can’t just collect e-mail addresses
from kids and send them marketing material directly. So they are
embedding messages saying, ‘Play this game and share it with your
friends,’ in order to target the friends.”

Other members of the coalition include Public Citizen, the Consumer
Federation of America, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.

In their letter to the F.T.C., the groups also ask the agency to
investigate additional marketing practices that they claim are unfair or
deceptive. These include sites that use computer code to track
children’s activities online or sites that ask them to upload their
photographs.

In an e-mail, Tom Forsythe, a spokesman for General Mills, said the
company followed approved practices. It does not collect the original
child’s e-mail address and sends only one e-mail to that child’s friend,
he said.

In an e-mail, James Anderson, a spokesman for Turner, said the Cartoon
Network took compliance with the children’s online privacy law seriously
and would review any accusations closely. A spokesman for Subway said
the company takes online privacy seriously and complies with the law.

The concerns about certain Web sites aimed at children come as the
F.T.C. tries to update children’s privacy rules to ensure that the
protections keep pace with the latest technology. The agency recently
proposed updates to clarify that the rule extended to mobile devices.

It would also expand protections beyond children’s names and addresses
to encompass persistent identifiers like tracking codes that could be
used to collect information about individual children as they visited
sites without needing to know their names. And it would add photos of
children to protected information.