Protecting kids identities online is a challenge
15 February, 2016
category: Digital ID, Government
Creating a Minors Trust Framework
Privacy Vaults Online Inc., or PRIVO, an identity and consent service provider, has been working on an initiative to help parents and companies gain a better understanding of COPPA.
“There’s rampant noncompliance,” says Denise Tayloe, president and CEO of PRIVO. “Companies either don’t understand it all, or they do understand it and they think they can fly under the radar.”
Its PRIVO iD is an online identity credential for families based on a trust model called the Minors Trust Framework. PRIVO has been developing that framework through a grant from the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), a White House initiative that aims to support collaboration between the private sector, public advocacy groups and public-sector agencies.
If companies want to stay in business, they must decide what pieces of personal data they actually need, collect it, secure it and be transparent about how they’re using it.
Under COPPA, parents have to separately answer each consent request they get from every online service their child wants to access. This has created challenges for both parents and website operators alike.
An even bigger problem arises when children circumvent the process entirely by lying about their age in order to access online services.
Student data mining scrutinized
While initiatives such as the PRIVO pilot are addressing parental consent issues, the rise of data mining has introduced a new wrinkle for COPPA and identity protection for children online.
The big game changer has emerged in the education space. Classrooms have been receiving educational technology, hardware and cloud services for free or at reduced rates. But this is not as altruistic as it may seem. Companies are providing the technology in return for the right to collect and aggregate demographic information and data on student preferences. “There has been a huge outcry about this by activist parents,” says Kelli Emerick, executive director of the Secure ID Coalition.
A 2013 report by McKinsey & Co. found that the use of student data could generate $890 billion to $1.2 trillion annually in global economic value.
In the U.S., some estimates value the pre-K-12 education software market in the U.S. at more than $8 billion, covering everything from online textbooks to games students play in the classroom.
“The market for pre-K through high school is huge,” Emerick says. “And these companies are collecting millions and millions of data points on kids.”
In January, President Obama announced his support for the Student Digital Privacy Act, which says that student data collected in the classroom could be used for educational purposes only. The act aims to prevent companies from selling student data to third parties for marketing or profiling purposes.
The president has also encouraged education technology companies to sign the Student Privacy Pledge saying they’re not going to sell data. As of June, 150 companies had signed the pledge.
Through the Minors Trust Framework, parents will be able to have their identity verified once by PRIVO and have the ability to give their children consent in advance to access services within the PRIVO ID Network.
“We’re trying to give parents a way to say, ‘Hi, I’m a parent and I am willing to go through a little bit of vetting to prove that,’” Tayloe says.
So if a child participates in a contest in which he or she needs parental consent to upload a video, the child can log in with a PRIVO ID instead of having to provide the parent’s email address.
In 2013, PRIVO was awarded a $3.2 million NSTIC grant to develop a pilot for an identity protection system to help keep families safe online and help companies to comply with COPPA. The grant period began October 2013 and goes through March 2016.
The pilot is at the implementation stage. PRIVO is in the midst of delivering its credential service to some of the pilot participants, with the goal of getting its first 1 million accounts under management. Verizon is among the companies collaborating with PRIVO to roll out the pilot.
Tayloe says the goal is to equip millions of parents and children with a way to better manage their personal information, understand how it’s being used, and have online access in a compliant way that preserves privacy.
“If every company puts their head in the sand and pretends like they don’t have kids on their service – or dumbs it down so much that kids have no choice but to lie because they’ve been marginalized – it’s as if we never taught kids to cross the street,” Tayloe says. “And it’s not possible for them to grow up and be good digital citizens.”