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About COPPACOPPA (COPPA is pronounced with a soft o, COPA, the Childrens Online Protection Act, is pronounced with a hard o, or long o, & was found unconstitutional by the lower courts last year, regulating age access to adult content sites) was enacted in October 1998, & became effective on April 21, 2000. It followed on the heels of a 1997 letter issued by the FTC in connection with kidscom.com (a child's web site) & a complaint filed with the FTC by CME (The Center for Media Education, a Washington D.C.-based watchdog group). It affects commercial US web sites, but applies to third-party commercial web sites that schools permit their students to access, & may apply to commercial portions of other sites. While nonprofit sites are not covered by the act, the term is not defined & many nonprofit sites, concerned about safety are complying nonetheless. It also isn't restricted to sites aimed at children, but includes general audience sites where the sites have knowledge that they are dealing with someone under thirteen. (Such sites have to comply with COPPA, & frankly don't understand what information they have about their site visitors that might implicate COPPA) There are essentially three key aspects of COPPA: Disclosure, Information Collection & Safety (Additional information can be found at www.aftab.com or www.ftc.gov) |