The Regulators Finally Wake Up
Let’s be honest, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, has been around since the dial-up era. For most of its life, it has been a toothless wonder, a set of rules that digital companies treated more like polite suggestions. Disney’s hefty fine changes the entire game. The message from the Federal Trade Commission is now crystal clear, the days of winking at compliance are well and truly over.
This creates a rather sticky wicket for every app developer, streaming service, and social media platform out there. How do you prove a user is over 13 without creating a monstrously annoying process that sends them running to your competitor? How do you handle data correctly when the rulebook is getting thicker by the day? The answer, I think, lies not with the household names, but with a handful of specialised tech firms quietly building the internet’s new plumbing.