FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Public Interest Privacy Center (PIPC) today joins over 100 organizations urging the House Energy & Commerce Committee to to move the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) as a standalone bill to a markup before the full House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
From the letter:
“H.R. 7890 is an effective, widely supported, bipartisan update to its 25-year-old predecessor. It extends privacy protections to teens, implements strong data minimization principles, bans targeted advertising to minors, gives families greater control over their data, and strengthens the law’s knowledge standard to ensure covered entities cannot evade enforcement. American families urgently need these protections. Big Tech’s business model relies on the collection of millions of data points on children and teens, all to rake in record profits through design features that maximize engagement in order to sell targeted ads. This system has contributed to a startling mental health crisis among our youth, along with a myriad of online harms including sexual exploitation, rampant cyberbullying, and eating disorders.
Meanwhile, the largest tech firms blatantly evade accountability. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta is actively generating profits from the sale of ads that steer users to online marketplaces for illegal narcotics like cocaine, ecstasy, and prescription opioids. This despite the fact that Meta is already under federal investigation for this very same conduct. Similarly, the Financial Times recently reported that Meta and Google launched a secret campaign to target teens on YouTube with ads for Instagram. Google allowed Meta to target users marked as age “unknown,” even though it was fully aware that those users were most likely children and teens. In doing so, Google intentionally misled the public about its targeted advertising policies. Adweek has since followed up on the Financial Times reporting, finding several more instances in which Google attempted to sell targeted ads to minors, in direct contravention of its stated advertising policies. Time and time again, large online platforms have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to self-regulate, because their data-driven business model is directly at odds with the health, safety, and privacy of our nation’s children and teens.”
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About PIPC
Founded in 2022, the Public Interest Privacy Center is a nonprofit organization that equips stakeholders with the insights, training, and tools needed to cultivate effective, ethical, and equitable privacy safeguards for all children and students. Our vision is that high-impact stakeholders at every tier will have the information and tools necessary to protect all children’s fundamental right to privacy. By educating and equipping high-impact groups and fostering a culture of privacy, PIPC helps create an environment where all children will enjoy privacy-protected benefits of emerging technologies and data use.
