COPPA 2.0 passes the Senate again, unanimously this time

Today the US Senate unanimously passed proposed legislation known as COPPA 2.0. This measure, fully named the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, aims to create new protections for younger users online, such as blocking platforms from collecting their personal data without consent.

COPPA 2.0 is a modernized take on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, attempting to address recent changes in common online activities, like targeted advertising, that could prove harmful to minors. Lawmakers have made several attempts to get this bipartisan bill through. While it has made varying amounts of headway in the Senate, none of the COPPA 2.0 bills to date have gotten past the House of Representatives. Industry groups such as NetChoice have previously opposed COPPA 2.0 and other measures around minors’ online activity such as KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. NetChoice members include Google, YouTube, Meta, Reddit, Discord, TikTok and X.

“This bill expands the current law protecting our kids online to ensure companies cannot collect personal information from anyone under the age of 17,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement about the latest result. “This is a big step forward for protecting our kids. We hope the House can join us. They haven’t thus far.”

However, there has been a bigger push both domestically and internationally toward restrictions on when and how younger people engage online. Several states — Utah, California and Washington to name a few — have enacted laws requiring some level of age verification, either to access mature content online or to use social media apps at all. Many of these efforts have raised concerns about privacy regarding where and how people’s personal information is stored and protected. COPPA 2.0 might wind up benefitting from the privacy debates since it emphasizes giving teens and parents ways to protect themselves from having their data used against them rather than asking adults to give up data in order to use the internet as usual.