At 13, children transition abruptly between two extremes—from potential helicopter parental surveillance to surveillance advertising that connects their online activity and search history to marketers serving targeted ads. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law, requires companies to obtain “verifiable parental consent” before collecting personal information from children under 13 for commercial purposes. Advertising identifiers – Android's Advertising ID (AAID) and Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) on iOS – enable third-party advertising by providing device and activity tracking information to advertisers. Deleting Advertising IDs off your teen’s devices can increase their privacy and stop advertisers collecting their data. To disable it, navigate to Settings > Privacy > Apple Advertising and set the “Personalized Ads” switch to the “off” position to disable Apple’s ad targeting. If you don't see an option to "delete" your ad ID, you can use the older version of Android's privacy controls to reset it and ask apps not to track you. A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report confirms what EFF has been warning about for years: tech giants are widely harvesting and sharing your personal information to fuel their online behavioral advertising businesses. To see which apps you have previously granted access to, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking. When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Then, they become targets for data collection from data brokers that collect their information from social media apps, shopping history, location tracking services, and more. Canadian lawmakers are considering a bill, S-210, that’s meant to benefit children, but would sacrifice the security, privacy, and free speech of all internet users. While users will still see ads after resetting or deleting their advertising ID, the ads will be severed from previous online behaviors and provide less personally targeted ads. Apple has its own targeted advertising system, separate from the third-party tracking it enables with IDFA. Before joining EFF, Miranda completed a Fulbright research fellowship in Spain to apply machine learning to 5G networks, worked as a data scientist at Microsoft where she built machine learning models to detect malware, and was a fellow at the Internet Society. Children over 13 gain the right to manage their own account and app downloads without a supervisory parent account—and they also gain an Advertising ID. Both Android and iOS users can reset or delete their advertising IDs from the device. At EFF, Miranda conducted research focused on understanding the data broker ecosystem and enhancing children’s privacy. Only apps that have permission to track you will be able to access your IDFA. If you have granted apps permission to track you in the past, this will prompt you to ask those apps to stop tracking as well. The advertising ID is a string of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your phone, tablet, or other smart device. Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are being tracked across the internet using identifiers known as Advertising IDs. In the United States, both Facebook and Instagram require users to be at least 13 years old to make an account, though many children pretend to be older. Advertising IDs track devices and activity from connected accounts. Apple requires apps to ask permission before they can access your IDFA. An amended version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that is being considered this week in the U.S. House is still a dangerous online censorship bill that contains many of the same fundamental problems of a similar version the Senate passed in July. Removing the advertising ID removes a key component advertisers use to identify audiences for targeted ad delivery. In this menu, you can disable tracking for individual apps that have previously received permission. In most countries, children must be over 13 years old to manage their own Google account without a supervisory parent account through Google Family Link. Google and Amazon – You Should Take Note of Your Own Aiding and Abetting Risk EFF has long pushed companies that provide powerful surveillance tools to governments to take affirmative steps to avoid aiding and abetting human rights abuses. On devices that have this feature enabled, you can open the Settings app and navigate to Security & Privacy > Privacy > Ads.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Tue, 01 Oct 2024 18:43:06 +0000