Summary
The Danish government unveiled plans to increase the age limit from 13 to 15 and 16 years old for providing consent to share data with tech companies, citing, in particular, the likes of Google, Snapchat, and Meta.
If the plan comes to fruition, these tech giants will be required to collect consent from parents in order to accumulate children’s data.
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"We must put an end to their opaque algorithms, which use crazy methods to keep children and adults in front of the screen and harvest unimaginable amounts of personal information." - Morten Bodskov, Demark Business Minister (source: Reuters) |
Children's data privacy is a burning topic these days. This announcement from the Danish government stems from Germany setting up the age limit of 16 years for data accumulation, while Hungary, Lithuania, and the Netherlands have been reported to be working on similar data protection laws.
In last week's edition of the Your Data Privacy Digest newsletter, readers learned about the recent settlement reached by Amazon, agreeing to pay a civil penalty of $25 million to settle federal charges related to children's privacy.
The charges claimed that the company kept sensitive information collected from children for years (including precise locations and voice recordings), violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). (source: The New York Times)
On the regulatory side in the U.S., the state of Louisiana has joined Utah and Arkansas in passing a new bill requiring minors to get parental permission to sign up for certain online services, including social media and multiplayer games. This echoes the sentiment expressed by President Joe Biden earlier this year in a Wall Street Journal column about Big Tech abuses:
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"We must hold social-media companies accountable for the experiment they are running on our children for profit," - Joe Biden, President of the United States of America (source: Wall Street Journal) |
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