• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 29, 2010

A prominent children's privacy advocate will ask lawmakers to urge the Federal Trade Commission to broaden regulations that prohibit marketers from collecting personal data from minors under 13.

Kathryn Montgomery, an American University communications professor and also an architect of the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), will say that the current regulations, enacted in 2000, need to be updated to reflect new developments in communications. "The commission must ensure that its regulations implementing COPPA include the full range of Internet-enabled or connected services, including the increasingly ever-present cell phones children use, along with Web-connected gaming devices and online, interactive video," she will state, according to her prepared testimony.

Montgomery will be among the witnesses at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Thursday about new technologies and COPPA. The FTC said last month that it will consider whether to impose new restrictions on companies that collect data from children.

The 12-year-old statute prohibits companies from gathering personal information from children younger than 13 without their parents' consent. In a notice published last month in the Federal Register, the FTC specifically asked how the regulations regarding that law should apply to new platforms, including mobile, interactive TV and interactive gaming.

The agency also said it was considering whether the definition of "personal information" should be expanded to include "persistent IP addresses, mobile geolocation information or information collected in connection with online behavioral advertising."

The existing COPPA regulations prohibit companies from collecting names, telephone numbers, addresses and other data that unambiguously can be tied to identify and contact specific individuals. In the past, regulators and industry executives drew a line between that type of "personally identifiable data" and other supposedly anonymous data, like IP addresses or profiles tied to cookies in users' computers. More recently, however, FTC officials and others have questioned whether the distinction between personally identifiable data and anonymous data still makes sense, in part because some consumers have been identified based on supposedly anonymous information.

In addition to her comments regarding COPPA, Montgomery also will ask lawmakers to encourage the FTC to craft new proposals to protect data about teens under 18. Among other items, she will ask the Senate to urge the FTC to say that companies should not use behavioral targeting techniques to advertise to minors under 18 unless they have explicitly opted in to such targeting.