When It Comes to Protecting Kids' Privacy, Call Us the Energizer Bunny

For 14 years, Common Sense Media has been trying to get Congress to update the one federal law that protects children's privacy online: the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We have fought to extend COPPA's protections to teenagers, since it only covers kids under age 13 today, and to ban targeted advertising that pushes unwanted products on kids. Congress has been a tough place to pass anything when it comes to kids and tech.

Our privacy advocacy began during the rise of the smartphone and mobile technology. And it has continued into a new age of biometrics, virtual reality, and the rise of AI. Children are living in a world of constantly increasing surveillance and data collection, and the stakes could not be higher.

We have been working alongside champions like Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), who passed COPPA into law in 1998 and introduced his first effort to update it, called the Do Not Track Kids Act, in 2011. He reintroduced it, or a version of it, every two years, and we supported him every time. It was lonely work. You can see our 2012 call to action, our 2013 blog post, and our 2019 call to action. We filed comments with the executive branch (2014 NTIA comments) asking for privacy for teens and more protections against targeted advertising. And we've filed many comments since then. We testified before Congress twice (2021 testimony one and two), always asking for updates to this foundational law. In the interim, while Congress did nothing, we turned to the states—playing the lead role in taking ideas from COPPA updates and getting them turned into laws such as California's Eraser Button (2013), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act (2024), and the New York Child Data Protection Act (2024).

Ever since we started to advocate for children's privacy, concerns about this issue have grown across almost every corner of the country. Sen. Markey has co-authored his COPPA update bills with Republicans every time, including Sen. Cassidy (R-LA) this year. And he has worked in both the House and the Senate on the same issues. In 2022, the bill passed a key committee, the Senate Commerce Committee, but then nothing else happened.

Until now.

In 2010, we called COPPA "woefully out of date." On July 30, 2024, the U.S. Senate finally approved COPPA 2.0 as part of a larger bill that also addresses one of our other top priorities, social media health and safety for kids and teens. Congress is now the closest it has been in 25 years to finally updating privacy laws for kids. The next step is to get the U.S. House of Representatives to agree with what the Senate did this summer. We haven't rested over the past 14 years—and we won't until this job is done.

This story is a lesson in how hard it can be to get Congress to do the right thing. It's also a testament to our commitment to sticking with our mission to ensure a healthier digital world for all kids. The wait has been long and hard, and Congress's refusal to act has been inexcusable. But we are confident that the wait and the work will be worth it.