Biden Holds Big Tech Accountable for 'National Experiment' On Collecting Children’s Data for Ads

In his State of the Union Speech last night, President Biden called on Congress to pass legislation that limits big tech firms from collecting and using children’s data on social media platforms for targeted ads. Holding social media platforms accountable for their “national experiment” and profiting off children, Biden said it’s "time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children." Frances Haugen, the former Meta employee-turned whistleblower, was in the House chamber for the address. Haugen leaked internal documents showing the tech giant was aware of the negative impact social media platforms can have on children. The White House is championing the effort and will allocate at least $5 million of the FY 2023 budget towards research and solutions on the ills of social media. Snap, KR&I: Gen Z, Millennials Value Privacy But Don’t Feel They’re Getting Enough of It As expected, there’s a mixed reaction from the ad industry and privacy advocates. Some cheer Biden for his remarks, while others express disappointment that the administration is focusing on a “smaller and politically feasible goal when there’s broad consensus that national privacy legislation is needed,” said Trevor Hughes, CEO and president at International Association of Privacy Professionals. For Biden and congress to have raised this issue last night was “not new and surprising,” Hughes said, adding, it “may be an indicator that the administration is looking for a politically feasible way to move this issue forward." This is no indication that federal privacy legislation will be put forward in this Congress. So, what kind of legislation are we expecting? Currently, there are two bills in Congress. The first bill from Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn seeks to protect children online by limiting features such as autoplay, rewards for time spent on the platform, and opt-out of algorithmic recommendations that use a minor’s data. The second bill introduced last year seeks to extend children’s privacy protections to teenagers. Earlier, the protections were only applicable to children up to 12 years of age Outside the bills in congress, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) along with more than 700 companies have been advocating the FTC to update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which focuses on children 13 years and under and creates protections with verifiable parental consent and other mechanisms to ensure that data is not collected inappropriately on younger children. “The FTC started a COPPA review process in 2019, but has failed to move forward, despite receiving hundreds of comments from stakeholders,” said Lartease Tiffith, evp of public policy for IAB. With the limited resources that FTC and congress have, modernizing COPPA and its enforcements takes priority rather than “waste time and money on misguided efforts to ban the reasonable use of data for advertising purposes,” he said to Adweek. Why is this an issue now? Even though a federal privacy policy does not appear on the horizon, Biden's indication that social media was an area of focus for the administration should be troubling and concerning for the ad world, according to Hughes. Congress is focused on ad tech and it’s only going to tighten its scrutiny in the months to come. While regulatory and enforcements are underway, “the ad tech has some very serious challenges ahead of it,” said Hughes. “Any actors in the advertising industry, ad tech more specifically, that do not have privacy expertise on their staff right are very late," he said. "[They] are likely going to find themselves in more risk-filled troubled waters."