Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we check out a new piece of tech being tested by the SuperAwesome company in the effort to make compliance with child protection privacy laws like COPPA easier for online websites and companies.
COPPA, or the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, was passed into law in 1998 and governs online collection of personal information by persons or companies under U.S. jurisdiction, specifically about children under 13 years of age. Operators of websites and services that cater to this audience must follow certain guidelines to protect children's privacy and data online, and restrictions are placed on marketing to these consumers.
It can be quite difficult to properly comply with the law, so many online services disallow any users under the age of 13. Of course, this is typically verified with just a question when setting up an account, and a simple lie about a birthdate can circumvent such systems. Failing to comply with the law can bring actions against you by the Federal Trade Commission, with fines of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
We can save a more detailed review of COPPA for another day, but suffice it to say, online game companies and similar services must always be concerned about compliance with this law, else they risk a very damaging fine and judgment against them. So any technology that can help online services detect when a child is using the service would be helpful to allowing them to filter the necessary protections to those users only when it is appropriate.
Enter SuperAwesome, a company that is designed to make brands and content owners working online fully compliant with the various local privacy laws, most notably COPPA and the recently-enacted European GDPR. The latest tech from this company is an artificial intelligence which can tell if a user browsing a site is a child or an adult, based on 300 indicators trained into the system including things like nature of the content, how interactions are being done, where the screen is being tapped, etc. Thus, instead of relying solely on the good word of users putting in an accurate birthdate, online companies can automatically detect likely child users with this tech and then trigger the additional protections needed to comply with privacy laws.
As someone who has children on locked down Pokémon Go accounts that Niantic never fixes because compliance with these laws is apparently too hard, this type of tech would be welcome in actually improving protection of children online without being too burdensome or a waste of time for everyone else. Plus it's yet another field where AI is making a big impact for the future of law and our online existence.
The Bottom Line is: as privacy laws change and we interact more and more online, expect companies with cutting edge tech in this field like SuperAwesome to become new giants of industry. Indeed, this company is already valued in 2018 at over $100 million dollars, so we will keep our eyes on this company for further interesting developments as we move forward.
POSTNOTE - Just an FYI, the Legal Geek will be appearing at Origins in Columbus in June and at GenCon in Indianapolis in August with educational seminars on IP law for game designers. Please come out and say hello if you'll be at those conventions!
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