The Center for Democracy & Technology ("CDT") respectfully submits these supplemental comments in response to the Request for Public Comment ("RFC") on the Federal Trade Commission’s Implementation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA Rule" or "the Rule"). CDT has also submitted a set of individual comments addressing specific questions raised by the Commission in the RFC, along with a broader set of Joint Comments on behalf of itself, The Progress & Freedom Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This document provides additional discussion of the constitutional and privacy problems raised by recommendations to expand COPPA to cover older minors. CDT's earlier submitted comments addressed the problems briefly, but now that several commenters to the FTC are specifically urging statutory modifications to COPPA to cover communications by and with older minors, it is appropriate to address the concerns in greater detail. We appreciate the opportunity to express our views on these vital questions.
By its statutory terms, COPPA is limited to addressing the collection of information from young minors – children who are 12 years old or younger. The Commission, of course, lacks the authority to alter this statutory term or to extend COPPA-like rules to cover older age groups. Nevertheless, two sets of comments urge the Commission to extend COPPA to older minors, or at a minimum to recommend to Congress that COPPA be extended. One set of comments specifically assert that COPPA or the COPPA Rule should simply be extended to reach the speech of and with minors up to age 17 (with a variation of the COPPA Rule for 16 and 17 year olds). A second set of comments argued not to extend COPPA, but instead to create an additional data privacy framework that would apply only to teens.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
