Given the increase in distance learning as well as in video streaming in the age of coronavirus, kids privacy advocates are doubling down on their call for the Federal Trade Commission to mandate more kids data collection disclosures from digital media and marketing companies and edtech companies.
Related: Kids Advocates Say FTC Isn't Enforcing COPPA
That came in a letter from the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law for the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD).
“With schools closed across the country, American families are more dependent than ever on digital media to educate and occupy their children,” said CCFC’s executive director Josh Golin. “It’s now urgent that the FTC use its full authority to shed light on the business models of the edtech and children’s digital media industries so we can understand what Big Tech knows about our children and what they are doing with that information. The stakes have never been higher.”
The companies whose "array of opaque" data collection and marketing practices they want disclosed are Google, Disney, Zoom, Comcast, Viacom and edtech firms Edmodo and Prodigy.
