COPPA Compliance for Child-Directed Apps: What Businesses Need to Know Before Launching or Scaling
A children's app can be beautifully designed, commercially successful, and technically sophisticated—and still create significant privacy risk if children's data is collected, tracked, shared or monetized without the right safeguards. For businesses developing children's games, educational technology, social platforms, mobile applications and other child-directed online services, privacy compliance cannot be treated as a final-stage documentation exercise. Under the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Federal Trade Commission's COPPA Rule, compliance can affect the way a product is designed, the technologies integrated into it, the vendors engaged by the business, the advertising model adopted, and the way parental rights are handled. The important question is therefore not simply: “Do we have a privacy policy?” The better question is: “If a regulator followed every data flow through our product, could we explain why each piece of children...