DMA Reveals that Companies Have Been Targeting Kids Online--Want FTC to Prolong Kids Tracking

Today's missive from the Direct Marketing Association--along with the Chamber of Commerce, advertising, marketing, and TV lobby groups--urging the FTC to delay for months much-needed children's safeguards reveals an industry that has been engaged in behaviorally profiling and digitally stalking kids online (that's what retargeting is--you are stalked from site to site--and now platform (computer) to platform (mobile) as well.
 
Of course, the DMA should have no credibility at all.  It is, after all, the group which infamously proposed that all of marketing and advertising be made exempt from the most basic of privacy safeguards--a Do Not Track system.  But what's most revealing in its letter sent today to the FTC is the following lines: "The expansion of data elements that are considered to be “personal information” have brought a number of new entities under the Rule, and expanded obligations for entities that were already subject to the existing Rule.  In many cases, the amendments contained in the COPPA Rule significantly impact the long standing business model that these companies have relied upon in planning the capabilities of their products and services since COPPA’s inception." 
 
What this means is that companies have been engaged in placing tracking cookies (conducting surveillance on kids) and other means so they can target kids for digital marketing.  The new rules coming in would make a parent first have to be told and then affirmatively consent to such kid-tracking.  The "long standing business model" the DMA cites is the no holds barred `we track and target a consumer 24/7' model they and their allies have endorsed. 
 
The DMA and others don't want to give parents the power to decide.   Bydelaying the new rules until early next year, instead of this July, they hope to have time to further undermine kids privacy.  Advocates  that represent the best interests of children--pediatricians, educators, consumer advocates, health experts--told the FTC today not to delay.  The FTC's mandate is to protect children's privacy--and we expect it to place that overriding concern over the narrow interests of lobbying groups that defend the consumer data collection status quo.