Today, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced updates to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that addresses many of the concerns of industry.   In response to the new rules, Association for Competitive Technology Executive Director Morgan Reed made the following statement:

Final Rule Makes Important Changes for Large Companies and Platforms

“ACT and the app developer community appreciate the FTC’s efforts to address to remove ambiguity and address the concerns of large companies  and app platforms.  These changes are welcome, but the FTC did not do enough to ensure continued opportunities for educational app startups.”

“While we appreciate the efforts of Chairman Leibowitz, we are particularly concerned with his expectation that the industry will simply find a solution to the new rules.   It is akin to jumping off a cliff with the plan to build the parachute on the way down.  While that may work for big companies, small companies lack the silk and line to build that parachute before they hit the ground. “

Where will Educational Innovation Come From?

“Today, tens of thousands of independent app developers from around the country are building the future of education.  I am worried who will be left to finish that work tomorrow.

“These innovators want to provide groundbreaking educational innovations while protecting the privacy of their users, but $9,500 in legal fees represents more than a year’s worth of income for most educational apps. Moreover, even if an app does not actually require COPPA parental consent, the complexity of these rules will require most educational app developers to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to confirm one way or another.”

Third Party Plug-ins Are Critical to Educational App Startups

“We are very concerned about the implementation of this rule, especially as it applies to the use of third party plug-in technologies that make the app ecosystem possible.  At the press conference today, the speakers spent an extraordinary amount of time demonizing these technologies and suggesting the eventual implementation of the new rules would make it difficult for educational app startups to survive.  While large, vertically-integrated firms like Google never need to use third party plug-ins, the startup community is dependent on analytics, classroom tools, and other services provided by their partners.”

The Mobile Industry is Giving Parents New Tools, Making COPPA-style Consent Less Important

“In the mobile space, companies like Apple and Microsoft are giving parents the ability to control directly app downloads, app use, and data collection and sharing regardless of decisions made by the app developer.  These tools make the need for such drastic changes to the COPPA rules completely unnecessary. This is one area where the industry needs to work directly with the FTC to educate and empower parents and developers on best practices for protecting children’s privacy.”

For more information or to setup an interview with Morgan Reed, please contact Mark Blafkin at 202.420.7483.  ACT can also provide educational app developers who can discuss their concerns in detail.

Today, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released a new report entitled “Mobile Apps for Kids” that highlighted a persistent privacy transparency gap on mobile apps for children. During their press conference, the FTC highlighted the Association for Competitive Technology’s education and transparency efforts as “promising.”

In response to the report, Association for Competitive Technology Executive Director Morgan Reed made the following statement:

“For the past year, we have educated hundreds of app developers around the country on best practices for privacy and developed new transparency icons. The message from the FTC today is that they appreciate our work, but we still have a lot to do.”

“The rapid growth of the mobile app industry has been fueled by startups and first time developers, some of whom are still in high school. In fact 87% of apps aredeveloped by small or micro businesses that do not have legal departments or privacy experts on staff. This report reminds us how important it is for the industry to focus attention on educating developers on privacy best practices.”

“We partnered with the world’s largest group of educational app developers, Parents with Apps, to run educational seminars and even create a new set of privacy disclosure icons for kids apps. We are continuing this work in 2013 and expanding it to include to all app developers.”

“One area of progress that the FTC missed, however, is on unique device identifiers like Apple’s UDID. Apple and the other platforms are moving developers away from using device-specific identifiers that can be unified across apps and services, and are introducing alternatives to limit tracking that are app-specific for sharing with advertisers and other 3rd parties. This will make it very difficult to combine information based on these ID’s across multiple apps or the web. Additionally, the platforms have given parents very granular tools that allow them to prevent apps from accessing certain types of data (like geolocation) regardless of app settings.”