Are going to get started. Welcome. My name is ian adams, Vice President of policy and text freedom, we are a nonprofit nonpartisan Technology Think Tank and we tends to work on charting a path forward towards a Bright Future where Technology Enhances freedom and freedom enhances technology. We are delighted to have you here today for our event. A couple housekeeping matters, we will go through the various panels and presentations so if you have to go please do so. There will not be a break in the middle but we urge you to avoid camera shots if possible and not to trip on wires. That is not good. The only other thing is our hashtag and if you need to log into the wifi, it is constituent. We will turn to our first panel which is creators in this space and they have produced some introductory videos, enjoy, thank you for coming. We have a stand up and shout audience with our team of educators is devoted to creating original content that will delight and inspire children. We make preschool videos that are thoughtful, educational and entertain kids, our mother goose channel has families on youtube. They are fun. Parents love them because they encourage loving and family bonding. How do we know . On any given day, they watch our videos millions of times. Altogether that comes out to billions of views and millions of subscribers. Our fans show us through videos, pictures and emails and by commenting on our videos. Who are our fans . Our audience is Young Children, parents, and caregivers and they rely on Mother Goose Club. Our broadcast quality videos are short, 100 safe, and full of color and fun. That is why kids to and in from around the world. They know that Mother Goose Club means music, dancing and learning. Mother goose club is a true interactive experience. Kids dont just watch, they sing, dance, clap and giggle along. Parents follow right behind, recording and sharing the moments. They come back again and again as one of youtubes leading channels, a trustworthy device in any situation from birthday parties, road trips to cozy afternoons at home. Kids love to play, families come together. And and and and our average age of conventions it is between the ages of 2534, the way we celebrate culture on my channels using crack, materials like homework way which is an updated version of playdoh but more permanent. Any message we enjoy crafting is through having fun and a little skepticism. The main goal of my channel is to entertain while learning new skills. In addition to that my channel does reviews of craft kits. The reason i do refuses to give parents and people with purchasing power the ability to make smart decisions. And the shortcomings really dont merit the purchase. So at 12. 99 we should be getting a little bit more color. The quality of the booklet and color, my biggest concern is a female creator, many hobbies going into the category of traditionally childlike party, where people who do craft whether it is adults or arts or squeegees and transforming those should not be deemed as child type content just because materials themselves might traditionally be something enjoyed and if this does go through the biggest impact will in fact be hurting a female creator. Many failed counterparts use power tools but many of us in the female crafting Community Use things like clay, colored pencils, watercolors and squeegees. I would like to have this open dialogue with you to protect female geek culture and challenge focus on how to keep them wholesome. We are working hard, feeling that with each other and patient with each other. Can you say dad data . The storm has begun, the rain coming down. Definitely fits. We are sure to go we are not trying to display the ideal, not trying to display perfection by any means, we tried to go through marriage counseling, struggling with depression and anxiety. Today is a big day for the service celebration. Two reasons for our kids. On to our final destination. Good night. I run the Youtube Channel, daily live stream on gaming, what that means is it looks a lot like sitting down every sunday and watching football. It has been said on your computer chair and tv and your computer monitor, as far as video games in live stream mode, the most popular games in the world, and roadblocks, viewers can join into my games with me and play live on live stream. And actually footage of a recent live stream of me playing with my computer and that is my career in a nutshell. It is more complicated than video games. It is an entertainment, youve got to be entertaining, numbercrunching, a bunch goes into it. That is what i do on youtube. Thank you for those videos. Im sure the audience is familiar with your work and some are just discovering it. On a personal note i thank all of you because i have siblings of different ages and that covers all the content you create and thank you for quieter car rides and timeout when i could do something that is very important. A lot of people to the kids who learn from it and develop. We dive in and talk about your business or channels how you create and the second will do that. We will start high with the money and follow the money. How does this change affect your revenue stream in any way . I will start. I would like to apologize for my voice. The changes have only come in the beginning of this year so we are still seeing what the impact is. Having said that knowing these changes would come into affect the they substantially altered our Business Plan in the Fourth Quarter to pretty much frontload as much production we are planning in 2020 into the last quarter of the year. What that meant was production streams we plan to do this year to identify the minimum to keep our channels viable and get as much production done while we had a budget we could plan around. In our case for the summaries, our content is produced and we work with professional animation houses so that is quite a bit of overhead and requires us a minimum amount and have a lot less flexibility than other channels. We took advantage of knowing what our budgets were, made those, executed those plans for 2020, much reduced content pipeline for contractors and employees, not much less. So when the changes took place where the ftc on september 4th announced as First Impression application they would consider youtube creators as operators. What the implications were and how it would apply to us and our channel. We do a family blog with five kids showing what we are doing in our day and in our business a major component of it, and we were told with these changes, personalized ads we would be turned off on content that was directed to children. A new channel called j house junior, we wanted to be specifically edited and directed to children, we wanted to be popular on youtube kids, we had two editors to make that and trained to do higherlevel production to make shorter and more entertaining video for kids and when the announcement came out that it was applying specifically to creators there are all kinds of risk. We could be facing the penalties, 42, 000 per video as a potential risk, we could face up to and 1400 videos, 200 hours of content, we decided to shut down production of j house junior because of the unknowns, uncertainty and loss of revenue and youtube so this will was a contemporary contents. Like harry said the implementation of that happened this weekend so it is too early to say heres what happened and we need to compare analysis of what happened to your going to do that month by month. It is too early to say for sure what it looks like. I have a few friends who have been directly affected by this and a few of them have reached out to me and reported they have lost revenue of 60 percent90 of total ad revenue. Some have to completely shift contents to be more mature, more adult focus to qualify under this. A lot of them are completely happy to just quit youtube and their channels altogether. My channel when i do crafting, it is very inclusive and with all the changes happening i find myself intentionally slowly starting to use alienating type language, doing this with your kids, i say we can do this with beginners. Trying to shift my language even though this is supposed to be, it is a medium we could all use in order to destress and have fun but when it comes to all these rules, i find that im starting to shift my language and i want people to see my channel is not something that is child directed. Because these changes havent been, we havent seen the wrath of it yet a lot of people in the crafting Community Using watercolors and colored pencils have been flagged and had their Comment Sections turned off and that made content for people above the age of 18, teenagers and up but at this point they did get hit as their Comment Sections were turned off and start panicking as well. Two things already happening and what else from changes in how Youtube Comment sections play, any structure. On a video made for kids. They are not a big deal. You say this is a creator which sets us apart from tv we are able to interact with the audience. And one of our sons had seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy, we have people wanting to reach out to us and tell us their story and experience and creating a Community Around these topics. Comments getting shot off is such a loss. We spent hundreds of hours responding in the building and they are gone. The other thing that is a big deal is there is a feature called i cards. You put five on each video. The interactivity where we ask do you know someone who has epilepsy in your family and we are able to recommend videos related to what we are going through. We had earthquakes in our family and made a video about that. When we talk about it i can put my card that says heres another video where we have an earthquake or another one where we went through a tornado. Those futures are being removed. A lot of futures who engage and have good experiences were removed on videos and child threat. I will talk from experience and im a College Professor in addition to doing youtube, think the Comment Section of the classroom and tell your students you cant ask questions and cant have anything in terms of enrichment other than watch me lecture in front of the classroom. It wont evolved. You wont have a sense of community engagement, youre removing everything that makes the classroom engaging, the socratic method if you believe in it, that is what the Comment Section is for most of us, we are engaging, enriching, and it is a learning experience not just on one side but both sides. Many times people are like you are doing it wrong and they give me the right way to do it so im being enriched by this experience. I want to stay on the topic of live stream of live stream, it completely shuts off the live chat as well, which defeats the purpose of live stream because they cant live interact, no way to donate, that gets removed so you are talking to a wall. For our audience the major loss was playlist, for the parents of Young Children the most important tool they could use to curate and manage their childs experience was by having their own private playlist. For them to lose the ability to create playlist with their family affected a lot of families. I would say on the playlist we have our own playlist and users use our playlist. We have a situation where we would take our playlist and change around the videos for a while, to promote our latest video and many families want to watch the videos in a particular way especially with special needs and the change affected them. The playlist the way they are, many families had their own playlist. It is a blow for them on that future. With the rest of our creators, and the percentage of who watches your videos. It is very hard, and it is mine craft and mine craft was originally intended for teenagers, would not one of the biggest games in the world, it has he is playing, kids playing, little kids, teenagers, adults and the thing about the internet, and someone who watches my little pony, not true. And dont know who is watching videos. The other 95 , no idea, no way for me to tell. Youtube, we have brand deals with tmobile, bed, bath and beyond and the demographic by age and the demographic by gender, that is aggregated together and given to us and we can use it. We determine whether our content was made for kids or not so we are left guessing what is and what is not i predominantly make content for a specific audience which is geeky female crackers and to say i have 80 of my audience are females the age of 18. I have that information but the analytics as of the age of 13 and up, the majority of my audience is in fact according to the analytics between 1845. I wanted to note one thing we learned from this process, this conversation, very Little Information out there, how Little Information about the audience, quite a lot of privacy on youtube, we just dont know. The information we will get about our audience is very much aggregate information on the country level and the us aggregated to the state level. We have information only 13. With our audience, with most of our audiences under the age of five and primarily in 30s and 40s and people over the age of 60, parents and grandparents and for us, that is in many ways the ones selecting our program. And the ones deciding to watch the program. And and they were reaching out to us. And the range of different audiences. One thing i want to point out, such a small group of youtubers, we have gaming, family blogs in preschool education. When you consider the content that may be attractive to question you think of the music, go to youtube kids and that is on youtube kids, related to toys and education that is and from preschool though science videos, comedy, animation and all these categories are up on youtube and they are not sure what to do and it is a creative word combining and collaborating all this content in new and different ways. What is the audience and we know children 12 years old with the protect kids act, and you nailed it. You mentioned my little pony, a lot of adults watch it. And in my childhood, there were sailor moon videos. Remember when i was six and that was it for me. Such a hard line, a lot of adults and children, you mentioned beauty, a huge following among preteens and teenagers for beauty youtube and their contents, i am watching it, i want my bill sister to not hear these words yet. It is tricky and i think we should go to the next question, what do you do, do you collect personal information. Supposed to protect personal information and that was the goal. Your goal is to engage children, engage imagination and development but at the same time there are people who would think that. Do you collect personal information . What do you do with it . We have to think about what kind of information we get from youtube and we get pie charts, that is it. Fake charts that have divisions and that is the deepest kind of data which is age where geographically our audience could be from. That is about it. We dont have deep dive information or personal information about anyone at all. I would say on that front, this goes to one of the things that was surprising was when we creators were identified as operators. That was a surprise because we dont really have any capacity to do much about the platform. They provided, tell us what we can see and what we cant see. What do we see . We see in formation at a country level. How the information is obtained and relates back to, doesnt get shared with us and i would say that before you think of the logistics it is quite impossible to do much more with information beyond that. Im not aware of anyone, i have never been interested in information that was more granular than that. If you are talking hundreds of thousands of views, it is not practical to look at anything more than general trends, we are looking at what the audience, how the audience is behaving, the stuff they dont share with you, when stop we all noted we had quite a lot of communication with fans because they reach out to us. We have subscribers on youtube by posting video. They message us and we respond to them. When we had comments we would respond but i would say nearly every creator response to every comment. Nearly every creator response to almost every comment. We get millions of views a day. People respond to everyone, not right away but eventually and thats a big part o we will engage and respond to people. If imd ou not mistaken doest mother goose have billions of views . If that would be some Fascinating Research but i guess my question is that how you guys are in many these changes. You also let up addition on change. Org which has almost 1 million signatures thats asking the federal trade commission to look into this issue and because all the creators are being heard and the content is being heard and the children and their experience is also being hurt by these rules. E would you say what feedback if any reaction have you gotten from your subscribers, support, what were the comments and thoughts on this change thats happening . One of the s big things, the primary purpose of coppa was to put parents in control of protecting childrens personal information online. When you look at the rally, in 2020 there was a Pew Research Poll that showed 81 of parents were allowing the Young Children to watch youtube. The reality is parents are taken devices that they purchased and handed it to the kids to watch youtube. What this regulation does in some ways is bypassed parents by saying we are going to be putting a liability on the creators, those who maybe dont have control over notification, they dont have control over the requirements of complying with coppa. But one ofom the concerns from creators ive heard from other creators is where is the responsibility on parents . And also are we ignoring parents preferences . A lot of what the o ftc settlemt is doing is trying to protect children from their Parents Choice to allow them to watch youtube which that was never the intent of coppa is to protect children from their parents, which is whats actually happened. Lets make sure we are putting responsibility where it should be and we are not passing liability to those who like control like the creators. Another thing i i want to sy is that my generation especially the younger one we primarily watch youtube. People come homecr from schoo. They watch youtube. Whats going to happen is if content is no longer monetarily viable, that people are not going to make kit content but the kids will not go away. They will stayr on youtube. I have an entire generation of kids just hearing people swear and watching more mature adult content because thats the only kind of content that can be monetarily viable. One of the things i would like toon see is a more definedi guess less vague definition of what kid appealing or child appealing content is. Like pets, i have my parrot invaders sometime but its notat child directed nor am i i targeting children but at the same time these definitions of pets or colors or music, these things make entertainment. They dont necessarily make child content only. If you have a video with no music, its not necessarily going to be in terms of editing at least more appealing. These are things i would like to see in terms of something a a little more defined, less vague. Also removing the fact that adults are adults. So youtube also started to treat adult viewers as coming from children when they are watching content that they deem could be child directed. Thats pretty condescending when you think about as an adult who is being treated as a child. Ded directed to thats pretty condescending would you think about as an adult who is being treated as a child. So that Something Else i would like to see revised as well. I would say that again, the impact is only really been implemented for the audience this month, so i would say the one thing that somewhat surprisingly to some degree that we have been hearing from people even like my friends, does this affect you, and i think that was obviously we made child directed content but everyone assumed that while they have their own experience with youtube and that this would affect their expense with youtube, it would affect them at elses experience with youtube especially if you are not based in the u. S. And so for a lot of the conversations weve had its been it will affect you, too. Theres nothing you can really do about it. As a parent or a user, as an adult user, and thats been a surprise to nearly everyone and something even this past weekend i was getting messages from people i knew saying, you know, does this affect you . How do i stop this . How do i stop this for myself . How do i get my experience back . I dont control the platform so theres nothing i could really do about that. And again one of the things ive mentioned in my video is that primarily in the crafting community, the Gaming Community has a lot of also issues but kind of overlap but at the same time in the crafting community specifically we are hurting female entrepreneurs because we are putting female type hobbies as child hobbies, which again is not the way to go about it. If you like to customize dolls. A lot of the material we do use are not for children either were using epoxy resin and using different kinds of sharp blades and trembled but not using power tools per se in the same way that our mail how to persecute them in the crafting community. Im really, really worried about the definition of what a child appealing type hobby in terms of what female type hobby is an putting them all in the same basket because this idea is really, really going to hurt female creators and entrepreneurs. A lot of them could be stayathome moms to figure out a way to use their talents to make a living. The other thing, we talk about how vague the standards are. Theres these three different categories comes your content can be child directed, mixed audience, or general audience content. We have the ten factors the ftc has given in the coppa ruled that were supposed to consider whether not the continent is, in which category and out coppa applies to us what it does not depends on which category its in. You look at the ten factors. We dont know as creators what they mean. One of the factors is language. There was a document from the ftc back in 2002 that says is the language simply not that a 12yearold can understand . What Youtube Content isnt . Are the characters from movies that are talked about . All of these definitions that are giving the subject matter the visual content, the age. The fact that there are children in my video, does that mean it is child directed . Theres a lot of general audience content that has children in it. One of the things where needy is a lot more clarity. For me its been concerning its even questionable and theres a station of the constitutionality of it. We should know whether a regulation applies to us not to wenders a speed limit sign you know whether your speedy enough because theres a number. With the empty seats almost like were giving a speed limit sign the just as dont go too fast. We dont know whether were going to fast or not and we ask for examples from the ftc and they are saying if youre going five miles per hour, thats slow, okay but if youre going 125 miles a note miles an note thats too faster you talked about a conversation you had with a said door the explorer is for kids and grays anatomy is for adults and its like we know the extreme examples but what about the cosby show . Whats concern is in the complaint they highlighted a family blog that has over 2,600 invidious, about a teenage daughter and daughter agenda than 13 and to make prints and they said the whole channel is child directed and they highlighted one of the biggest with a teenage daughter dyed her hair purple and he said look, you do best doesnt this as for kids and you to put on youtube kids and youtube had emails with employees the said this and that. Its like what did the greatest do . The creators said they were familyfriendly and thats not okay. They have these figures about dyeing their hair purple. We just come begging as you consider changes to coppa it has to be more clear because we dont know where to does it ourselves. Theres so much in the middle. What about those going 20, 30, 40, 50, 50 miles an hour . We are all left guessing and we will be judged could face these penalties and could face losing our businesses. Yet the thing is just the magnitude of the it. Like i said i have 1400 videos so i have to consider those ten factors in the totality of the circumstances with every one of the videos. And then say where should i lighten up . I talked to probably ten attorneys about this and that all interpret it different. Where do i draw the line and i really dont know and im trying really hard and im an attorney as well. Has fastened to the creator standalone attorney because youre doing my job for me is awesome. To wrap it up this room is full of staffers and privacy experts and advocates. We are also in cspan which is peak nerd d. C. , if you want to address all of those people, we have commissioned coming in later and ask them, and plead your case, now is the time. Lets just go down the line. I know its a lot, but like what would be your ask, what would you wanting to look into and to hear you out . Thats heavy. Ill start. Changing the age from 13 to 16 just makes things more confusing. Because you are measuring the nature of the content rather than the users. And that creates all kinds of enforceability problems and potential theres so much confusion, you can start to feel discriminated against because youre getting called out but then the guys who are doing trick shots are not getting called out on, you know . What i would look at the nature as a measure to determine and raising the age . We all know the difference between content made for threeyearolds and content made for a 33yearold. Who in europe until the difference of consummate for a 12yearold and 413yearold . Its indecipherable. How could you dont give 20 content for c15 and a 16 year old. That change, yes, it will bring in more general audience content but it just confuses the issue. The other thing is the ftc in their 2013 changes said they wouldnt put more emphasis on one factor above another but theyre beginning to that. They are starting to put emphasis on the factors that you tubers dont have control over. As you put emphasis on the audience itself, we do have control over how youtube is suggesting us and youtube kids and how many of the kids are seeing are based on the recommendation. I can never figure i posted back in 2014 that is general audience content but then in 2019 youtube could suddenly start promoting it on youtube kids and they can get 1 million views. That means after the monitoring that content every checking to see what youtube is doing with it and do their recommending it to to see if the balance has shifted to where the ftc may consider that content made for kids. As you put the liability onto people who lack the control, thats bad policy. As you think about changes for coppa dealt with the libel of people who dont have control. The people who have control of the parents who of the best control but the creators who cant get notification and consent should be the ones are getting the liability here. Something want to say is the internet is not black and white anymore. So like spongebob, for example, i grew up watching spongebob just because i turned 18 and i became an adult i did a movie like i cant watch spongebob anymore. If i see a spongebob video on youtube i will still watch it. Im sure is a lot of content on youtube that may be deemed or looked at as for kids, but im sure it has a big adult audience. Number one would be to keep stuff like that in mind. Number two is when making laws like this, please consult with people that do use the internet, and dont make laws for stuff you dont understand. Also one of the things that are think is really important is getting adults the choice to decide what the kids and what they want their kids to do. So consider consent as truly important and i dont think that should be removed from parents or people who are giving their tablets to their kids basically. Thats one of the important things here the other thing is definitely, i mean, a lot of collectors whether it be video games or figurines, these are people with purchasing power. Saying that again spongebob or Ninja Turtles as just for children is kind of detached from the rally that we live in, especially since a lot of the conventions are extremely popular and again the majority of the aged between the ages of 2534. Just like to echo the point about making sure parents are empowered. Parents should have the right to decide what kind of internet expands them want to have for the families and for themselves. And i would also like to stress the need to really identify and identify the harm that were trying to solve. There are a lot of problems on the internet that we would all agree should be addressed. Whats being described about certainly, for example, whether or not we collect information and how we target kids. We dont and most of whats been alleged about the creator involved issues not technically true. There are things that you need to be addressed. We would love to partner with you and share our insights in how the internet works with you to do all of that. Lets make sure were addressing the right things and not compromising what we have, which is to be clear for the first time in history, we have the ability for anyone in the world to have access to an unlimited amount of video content. Some of it is not great but most of it is awesome. It has benefited and enriched billions. Most of whom never be able to afford a Subscription Video Service or have access to videos like the videos that we make and the videos that hundreds of thousands of other creators worldwide make. Should appreciate that and celebrate that. We should make sure content gets better, not worse. Thank you so much for making the case, for listening to create a for sharing your experience. If anyone in the audience once again in touch with you and you just expressed your happy to collaborate you guys can come to us, we will put you in touch with our amazing creatures. Please join me in thanking all of them to coming all the way to d. C. And sharing this with us. The next panel will start without any intervention so please stay in your seats. Im berin szoka, techfreedom. You may mistake me for harry because were wearing the same outfit, which was not planned. Thanks again for coming. I think this is the fourth coppa event i think weve done over the we just jumped into the middle of things with a content creator panel, so youve heard from them what their frustrations are and the practical concerns they have. Have. In this panel we willen talk abt why theyre in that situation. You heard a lot of terms tossed around in the last discussion directed to kids, collection of information. Were going to unpack those now. Thought it would be better to just start with unit from people in the real world. I want to introduce our expert panel today. As us and we set a number of these folks on panels in the past. Angela campbell is professor at georgetown law clinic represents the campaign for commercial free childhood and the center for digital democracy. They have been among the groups that have been leading the charge for the ftc to do more about childrens privacy and the filed the complaint that led to the settlement we were hearing about on the last panel. Angela will explain the concern the letter andnd a group to do that. Jim dunstan is my colleague at tech freedom, our general counsel and somebody who has for the last 35 years done a lot of work on coppa representing content great online, also representing the largest creators of childrens media for television. So thanks to jim for coming. Sarah holland is a Public Policy manager at google. She advises teens on privacy and Data Governance and has been working on childrens privacy for over a decade. Phyllis marcus, i got to know initially when i started working at coppa back in 2008 and you were mrs. Coppa at the time at the ftc, and you work on the 2013 rulemaking and were there through 2015 and had been out there representing clients in private practice trying to do with coppa since then. And amelia, the latest addition to our panel, i didnt get up by a friend so why dont you introduce yourself to the audience . Okay. As of thiss on . Yes. I am director of youth and education privacy for the future of privacy forum. And you focus on coppa and coppa, youtube and the 132 plus privacy laws that been passed since 2013. Will talk about those things. To get started here, we could talk about this term coppa, childrens Online Privacy protection act. This is actually the third attempt by congress to regulate the internet to protect children. The first two laws, the key medication see decency act of 1996 and then copa couples 1990, all struckth down as unconstitutional. So coppa was congresses first attempt that survived and it survived and has avoided constitutional challenge thus far because it has been focus on trying to regulate not the entire internet, not affecting adults and content that is enjoyed by adults but rather a collection of information from children which could include things like kids putting in the names and their home addresses in free text fields online as well some other information we will talk about. Also some other information that we will talk about. One, where the creator has actual knowledge, and as weve heard from the internet, nobody knows youre a, dog so that doesnt always apply. Second, where the content is directed to children, and that is what we talk about on the last panel. So just to get us started here, i want to ask jim to tell us what carpet was intended to do, and then fill us to update us on what the ftc was trying to do. So, jim . What were they trying to do . So really, when you look at legislative history of coppa, there are two areas generally that coppa what designed to do. First and foremost it was designed to give parent control over the information of their children, so its very was a parental control. The protections were twofold, one, and primarily, it was a great fear that half they would camp out on the internet, reach out and find children and do horrible things against them. If you look at some of the testimony, then he talked about the ftc working together that they would be safe. Secondly, this was a form of coordination, where the congressman were concerned about, and specifically about the ability of advertisers to pick out individual children, find them, and market directly to them as individuals. So that was the benchmark on coppa. As we go forward, we need to understand that in the statute, the definition of information was limited to the things that you would think are really important information, it presents a name, serial number. You know address. Things it could be used to contact directly and individual child. That has been expanded, and we will talk about what happened in 2013, increasing things like Deal Location information, and this really pesky thing called persistent identifiers, where the crux of the debate is around today. That is where we came from, when he talked about the dangers of tradition and pedophiles online, and said theres little evidence to these processes. Its clearly troubling because it teaches children to reveal their information to strangers, so that is the link back in 1998. Theres been a debate because its unclear and always difficult, and a debate on what that means and what congress intends to do with that. The ftc was given some wiggle room because the one term that the ftc was able to use was the meeting of personal information. So initially it with names, address, that sort of thing, and then any additional criteria that they determine allows the contact of a specific individual. So that changed happened back in 2013, i want to ask angela to provide her perspective, but fillers can you update us on what happened in 2013, and then we will talk about the debate today and the deflecting views to what that should mean. As he said nicely, everything in the ftc ability to regulate childrens policy came from a statute that was enacted in 1998. There were some mandated reviews that had to occur under the statute, and then periodically the ftc reviews its rules to make sure that they are current. So there is a wholesale review that took place from 2000 from 2012 to 2010, and the advisory went into effect in the middle of 2013. There were a number of major changes that took place in the real review, one of which was the expansion of the definition of personal information. The constraint was that the statute indicated that the ftc could only expand the definition, where the ftc had made a determination that a different identifier permitted the direct interaction between an operator and a child that is permitted the operator to engage with a child. So there was a full scale analysis opposed by some in the industry, strongly supported by others. And ultimately the ftc decided that there were sufficient evidence that a persistent identify that could be used and across a body of properties. However defined. Mobile apps were relatively new, and weve moved beyond applications to other types of internet connected devices, but overtime, and across a body of properties to communicate however you would define communication, oneonone with the user. What that meant, boiling it all down was that it targeted advertising, from its an operator to track a user overtime and then tailor particular Marketing Communications back to that user, would now be in. There we were until last year, and critically in that 2013 update, they said that this amendment would not provide to uploading photos or videos on general audience site, such as facebook or youtube. Absent actual knowledge that the person uploading such files as a child. In other words, this is the two critical distinctions. Those two prongs, the actual knowledge, and the question of is this is a general sight or something geared towards individual users. Until the two settlement last year, the ftc had said that they were like other sites, and so the only way was if someone had actual knowledge from a child. So what changed last year . There was a complaint filed in 2016, and all that ends will jump in and describe this, a fundamental shift has been the cop a settlement, which for the first time has done away with what the ftc set in the footnote, and said that you do is no longer going to be a general audience site overall, but will look at the specific channels, specific videos on site to assess whether those are child directed. That is why the last panel is now talking about being liable to, coppa because of those who changes intersecting. We will talk about that today, and if you have questions for the audience, were little bit tight on time so we will not have a question session. Feel free to treat at us on the hashtag, keep an eye on the discussion. But what prompted you to file the complaint that you did . When you two kids of his first announced, we conducted and investigation and found multiple complaints about it, which they did nothing about. Youtube kids did not violate copper, because it did not have behavioural advertising, it had some advertising and it was contextual advertising. There is no cookie that tracks the user . There may be, but its not used for sending personal advertising. It is used for recommending videos. Internal operations of the site. What we realized was that all of that programming on youtube was coming from youtube. My clients kept asking me, they said, how can youtube get away with this, because they know they have childrens content, but theyre pretending it is not. In 2018 he found, we filed a complaint against youtube. Let me clarify, we did not file a complaint against any creators at all, only against youtube, and we had several different theories on which youtube was violating coppa. One was the actual knowledge standard and part of the evidence of actual knowledge was that they knew that they were having these channels that they were also putting on youtube kids that were intended for Young Children. We had other evidence as well, but we also argued there were two other grounds, and that youtube was in fact directed towards children that the largest audience is children, that is where children are. So also, youtube as a youtube parent google as the main Advertising Network knew there were kids and were advertising using personal behavioural advertising. They were actually doing the advertising for kids. So we had several different grounds on which we thought youtube was liable under coppa. When the ftc ruled, it was actually we were kind of per side that based on this very narrow ground of saying they had actual knowledge and therefore, to settle this thing, you have to tell them whether they are child directed or not. You cannot do behavioral advertising. That was not really the result that we expected or wanted. I have a lot of sympathy for a lot of the creators. I do think that youtube should be taking more the responsibility of complying with the law. Part of the reason we did it was a practical reason. I think that as a matter of law, all the creators are responsible. I also think that there is a lot of misinformation. A lot of things, i mean, mean, i understand why you are worried. I agree. Child directed with 10 different factors. There is no case law on it. The ftc has never brought, no cases they have actually litigated. I have a lot of sympathy. I think that there needs to be improvements in the current situation. I do think it is really important to protect children. Keep in mind we have a lot of people in the cspan audience that will not be familiar. Can you summarize what exactly did they do . I think im probably not the best person to speak. Lets have it. I think there has been a lot of focus on youtube. One of the reasons amelia here has a broad impact. You tube is very much a big name in the conversation, but by far not the only. Representing a lot of different clients affected by this as well. Perhaps more helpful for someone outside of the settlement to talk about it. We can obviously point people to a lot of information on the record as well. We are short on time here. Someone give us a really quick overview on what the settlement requires. Do want to jump in, amelia . We have a commissioner in the audience. He can also speak to it as well. My understanding is with every childrens privacy settlement that the ftc has entered into, the entities involved, google and youtube, have to have to comply Going Forward. They have agreed within the settlement to pay a large sum of money. Also, to implement a system system and maintain it whereby individual operators can flag for youtube that they are directed to children. Youtube has decided, from what i am understanding, that it will implement the rules by turning off particular features or altering particular experiences that there are choices to be made weird the baseline requirement is to comply. Altering experiences as we have heard in the room. Youtube is offering a number of resources for the operator to understand whether they do or dont fall into particular categories. The features being turned off are those that implement collection. Weve been talking about, i think its important to draw the distinction. Having a system that will accomplish this. They dont say you cannot have comments, you can not have playlists, you cant have all of these things that youtube has decided you cannot have. Maybe the way to set up right now, they cant let you, but there is no reason in those cases that they could not have comments and playlists and these other things without collecting personal information or without allowing children to comment. I think this is all a really good point. You have to talk about what is in the settlement. What google is required to do in the settlement which is actively seek out knowledge that something is directed to but i just want to make sure the audience is following, the features were talking about, thh recent theyre implicated it because they involve the collection oft information. When people hear that term they are often thinking like naturally thinkad about the cooe that enables the ad that shows you whats relevant to, not just on the continent but other things you looked at. Were talking about a wide array of features and things like comments because you can put in free text. Thats consideredut collection. Thats not intuitive to people outside coppa lamp. Quite intuitive because you dont want kids say hi, my name is soandso and im ten years old. I agree. No one would dispute thats what cards was intending to cover and writing coppa in first place. I just want to make sure were making connection between this panel and the last panel with the collective graders were explaining they are saying features disabled like playlists. A wide array of features that reduce their ability to build an audience especially a small content creators who are trying to attract attention. Thats what were talking about. Now the question is why are those features being disabled . Why isnt there a way, a practical way to enable them with the verifiable parental consent that coppa requires . Can you help us understand . I think goodness gracious. I work at a tech company. Because i think thats interesting question, its not relitigating the settlement, getting for what is the real impact in terms of both google and youtube as a platform for the creators but also everyone else that coppa touches. I think there is a way to do that and that something that came up in the earlier panel. They didnt use the word because we have wonkier panel and we use walk your terms but something called rebuttable presumption, something would put in our comments we filed with the coppa precedent because the ftc late last year asked a large number ofof questions about should we look at coppa, what are some of questions we have especially in light of the settlement. Its this idea about how you treat users who are watching made for kids content. There is a declaration that youtube creator said yes, this for kids orirected not. Youtube is implementing a system using Machine Learning and ai that we can talk more about, to basically check that and making sure theres not rotter abuse in terms of those declarations. We all know and i is not for that type of systems we dont want to over rely on that. Essentially if any content is made for kids the assumption is whoever is watching thatas is a child and theres a question about whether or not there an ability to rebut the presumption. You could sayeb me as an avid harry potter fan or avid lego fan, i dont want to call people out but i know someone in this audience is an avid lego fan, or Spongebob Squarepants any of these examples were used before. Gaudet and list are guilty pleasures. The question is, mike should you be able to a platform goes through a reasonable procedures to verify that viewer is, in fact, an adult, then be treated as an adult and have the comments features turned on, have the playlist features, te notifications and all these other things that really distinguish youtube as a platform from traditional broadcast for other platforms. Thats something others in the industry have called foror is le that basically voice of the psyche have to be treated as a child no matter if you are or not center because of the content you watch. We think thats really important thing that the ftc can look at Going Forward that can help strike this balance and really get to like what the heart of coppa is supposed to be, which is the protection of kids very much, the protection of the personal information. Nobody argues we shouldnt do that and do that job very, very well. But then you also want to make sure that law is clear and its easy to follow. People who want to do the right things like the creators that you spoke have like a really good like clear rules of the road about how to do the right thing and theres strong enforcement when thats not the case. But that comes with the clarity. We are thinking with things like that, with a lot more clarity about what is supposed to be made for kids, what is not considered made for kids content because that can be unclear. It can also be audience is something a lot of people talk about but i think that whats lost in the conversation is the context and how important that is and so i think like with Something Like crafting the context of that is it more important that perhaps some others. That kind of clarity and the balance in terms of those things can all help us navigate this post settlement post 2013 world of coppa. The child enjoys have to spend at least the first half just setting the tip for everyone. I think we have it now. W procedurally, there are two things going on. Theres a settlement the ftc reached with youtube last year and then the request for comments the ftc made to update the rules which they do every five years or so. So right now the ftc has taken commentsrs and the window has jt closed and the ftc will be working on this over the next few months. The fundamental issue of what our panel to talk about is this question of, are we in a position now of treating adultst as if they were children . That to me is the fundamental balance that congress is trying to strike back in 1998. On the what had yes, protect children. On the other hand, to the greatest extent possible avoid thee presumption that adults might be children and the critical question there is what counts as directed to children. You were the last panel talk about this. You heard some of our creators explained that may t be appliedn particularly arbitrary ways, unfair ways the content is created by and for women or younger women might be even more likely to be labeled as directed to children. So what can the ftc do right now to make that more clear in the absence of any litigation and just having these guidance document out there that say things like if you have cartoons or dolls or things like that, toys, he might be considered directed too children. What can ftc do right now . Im going to do this in lightning round so please throughout your quick thoughts as we go forward. I disagree with the question because i think when you say treat an adult like a child, what it really means for coppa purposes is their privacy that protected in ways that were not protected before and all these other things about not being able to, and so forth are not requirements under the coppa law. If anybody had piracy protections we would be in a different position so i dont think its an insult to treat, you know, to get people privacy protection. We didnt clarify thiss before. What does it mean when coppa is triggered . What is the legal burden and why is this a problem . Why does it interfere with the connection between content creator and the user . So it seems very technical and i think it can be viewed as a technical, especially if you are an operator who is kind of coming to this without the context. You have an operating in an environment where these particular requirements were not implemented and now they are being implemented. Theoretically, you would view coppa as a speed bump, that there are not within reason. There are not particular prohibited practices but you have to insert a parent or someone as an adult into the decisionmaking before particular collection and disclosure to do what . You mean what what is it that coppa requires . Thereso an opt in kind of hand raise. Its more than just a checkbox. In particular in situations, for example, in situation where comments are permitted and you can of user engagement. You f would want to put in placa system where someone has indicated im an adult and ive been consent to what will go on in this environment. It gets complicated when you are talking about the operation by individuals on a larger platform. Thats somewhat different in terms of what were looking at now, although as you pointed out in 2013, the ftc did talk about youtube, so the question is what i heard on the prior panel from operators is that theres for a little control of the platform in which the operators are engaging and maybe there isnt a uniform way for an operator to seek that parental consent on a platform in order to continue with some of the features like comments or behavioral targeted advertising but there is this kind of stop, pause, dont engage with kids in whatever way the law defines it, before you get that express verifiable consent and they continue. If you dont getwa it then you e supposed to stop. Jim, we hear this all the time. People say coppa, always requires his parental chris parental consent and then youre good to go. Is it that simple . Its not. I think when congress enacted coppa it assumed that there would be, become sort of automated mechanisms in which people could get that parental consent, and no good mechanisms have actually evolved. The only thing that is out there is hand me your credit card, ill charge of five cents and then give you a fight since reese refund and presumably only adults have credit cards. That part of coppa has always been this big gaping hole that congress i was going to be sort of the safety net for coppa. But the other thing i want to talk about is, want to go back to procedures, especially for some staffers we may have in the audience. Think about where they are and where we just came from. Again, you heard there are no cases. The ftc generally doesnt bring cases. They do bring cases but then i all settle out. Its between ftc and whoever the defendant was to define what the terms of theet settlement is. Unfortunately as were seeing with youtube settlement that now ai secondary tertiary come all the way down seven, eight levels of impact, and those people were not invited to the party to have that settlement. They did that at the exact same time there was already a proceeding open. We are now filing comments on a proceeding which is essentially been superseded by a settlement that nobody got to play in. Its even worse because of the way the ftc brought this particular action but there is no ability for anybody to comment on the settlement. It really was a totally smokefilled room and, frankly, probably people on both sides would of liked to of had a say in what happened with that settlement. Normally settlements get similar to a court and you can file comments. Right. At least thats what the options can ftc has. Right. Itto wasnt taken and so nobody got to sort of the engage in this discussion. Now were trying to play this catchup game of filing comments in a proceeding about a subtle we dont have any right to file comments on, but which really is going to have probably more impact on what happens with coppa that anything ftc can do Going Forward. Its already, weve already charted is due course because youtube, and interesting youtube is sort of one player in this ecosystem, the really a large player this ecosystem and nobody is going to do anything that doesnt sort of follow what youtube is doing here for risk of, you know, and potential liability. I want to make one thing clear. Phyllis talked about operators. Coppa is not new. Ftc has brought plenty of enforcement against operation in the past but theyve been websites didnt own this is creating their own content. This is the first time coppa is being applied to a platform whereoi there are a long tail of content creators such as the people we had on our last panel who are now themselves subject to coppa. Thats the fundamental change. Those people dont have legal departments. They are usually single operators or assaulting. They have to figure out coppa applies to them and they are now with that directed standard given the lack of clarity from the ftc in a in ay thats much more difficult than when bigger Media Companies have to a do that in the past. I want to pause for a second because we talk a lot about the settlement, as we should. That was big news, but also since the 2013 rule theres been a lot a change in terms of technology, in terms of content, how people consume it, the audiences. Its not just the our new questions as result of the settlement. The settlement does bring your questions but there are a lot of questions that have been open since 2013. I didnt want to lose that that its only the case that were asking these like hard questions about coppa. Its also nice to pressure test rules and laws after they have been written. But there has beenn this change. Fisma research thats been done about the content that created and now itss consume and that really, really important to bring into this and not just so we have less than 15 minutes. What can ftc do due to provide greater click of what counts as directed to children . Really quickly. They couldgr certainly open e rule. Short of the rule that a lot of tools and the toolbox. Commissioner phillips could speak to that the bottle is available. They could just be guidance and enforce the policy statement. Phyllis probably knows more about that than anybody. But there is the question of whether or not they should open up andab consider a full speed s how to go from a list of words like cereal and toys and cartoons to something that is more helpful to people like these folks . I will say in the ftcs defense, i guess i will put myself in that position, when you have this list of factors come in in a p wiki can be vies a gift. I think thats the way the ftc would have viewed it. That its better for operators to kind to match themselves up against a broader array of factors. Some of which are very concrete. Some are i i saw this in onf the comments, context you know, context and Something Else. But what is the look and the feel and the taste, and then theres the who mi intending to get to, and who is actually there. But you could put it all, all of these ingredients it of soup and cook it and you were supposed to come out for the most part with an answer. I do understand there are the margins and im t looking direcy at you but im not sure the margins are as wide quite as you said, thatm were directed to a four year old or we are directed to a 60 year. The ftc ec angela, i think you would dispute how active the ftc has been, but the ftc doesnt, hasnt taken the hard, hard cases. They have left that to some discretion andrd the cases primarily you understand whether a property is directed to kids or not. If i were to put on my hat, i think crafting would fall within the not directed to kids pocket because of the very its got a much broader appeal. Directed the families is another but thats a tricky one, directed to families, thats where i think that could be quite a bit of Additional Guidance that comes out. Because there is some confusion. Your general audience and you might have some kids of their as one thing. You were directed to and that is your sweet spot is another thing. Wewe will do coviewing of kids and families. That falls within this metal bucket and where does that get you middle what does your implementation look like what the ftc did so this wideopen and scare some people in the questionnaire that the issued where they are asking what to do about properties that are not intended to be directed to kids, were not designed for kids, i have a large number of children participating. You can see people getting very nervous about that potentially broadening the on beyond and having hillary to a whole nothr category it might have been intended to reach. But i wouldha say, wearing my bt advocate hat for operators, that having those ten factors can be a gift because you could make your best argument that you are not directed to kids, where there are not bright lines. But we have had a real shift because enough time butto Companies Legal departments and limited liability, corporate form. We are now talking about university professors, a young person who has created a Youtube Channel and a person whose family is now creating content. Were talking small entrepreneurs who have to makeea decision about can they risk this enormous legal liability . Ill ask sarah that question. What would you do in the case of somebody who believes theyve been misidentified . Thats a great question. I think there are processes in place to consult with that appeal. This was laid out in a post last week and will be more information about that, but there is a chance to consult with youtube and say we think this designation was not right and theres this stopgap measure of the ai system. But i think, i mean, we are what, a month in, so i think it will take a while. That are the risk that youtube makes a mistake in the text and that at essential puts them out ofi business, or forces them to change the nature of the content. Thats bad. That may put some out of business but its not as bad as the ftc, after somebody and then slapping them with a penalty kick you might the ftc may not do that, but angela, if im nt mistaken in reading your comments that sounds like some watchdogs intend to be on the watch and understandably so to look to see if there are content creators that you think are covered by the rule that are putting their content out there and have to think about that risk. Everybody may meanti well but if you are doing this as a passion project, you may just decide its not worth it or you may decide to really come as some of our creators were noted, you may start putting more adult content into your videos in order to make them less directed towards children. That can turn them one of the things the petition talked about, that would change the nature of content out there for kids and make it ironically more adult, it might mean more vulgarities. It might mean a change in content over all. These are the second orderer consequences where dealing with so how do we think about that balance . I dont think im speakingon we would be coming after like the crafters. We want to protect kids and want so all creators are not the same. Nickelodeon is t a creator but they do have legal counsel. They do have, you know, they have the ability and so what drives me crazy moors when you have like disney saying none of our shows, none of our websites except for the penguins want our child directed. I think the problem is there is a big middle area but is also about things worse very clear, they are child directed by a lot of copies will say no, were t child directed, and we see this especially with apps. Those of the people that we will go after, people that are either, they are big and still doing something wrong like youtube, or theres something where they are really truly misrepresenting. I thought are we child directed or not. A not of parents think that when they dont actually. What about coviewing, how about harry, he creates content Mother Goose Club for parents to watch with very, very Young Children, preschoolers. The parents dont have the choice to say we dont want targeting. Even the fact the parent might be watching with the kid doesnt change the fact that children can be manipulated through behavioral advertising. They havent given actual consent, and the child isnt protected. I mean, the question is arent they essentially giving consent . Theyve logged into their youtube account and allowing their children to watch, to watch these videos. Arent they giving consent to that . Why not . Because they havent consented to the advertising. They dont. Their choice is you can watch it and let your kid be targeted advertised to or not watch it at all. Thats not really a choice. Yes, it is. It really is. The problem is if we just say, you know, you cant have targeted advertising, we know the impact the revenue impact of that, what is that going to do for the future of new creation . Well, we dont know that impacted that. Its difficult to know. There have been reports. The thing about contextual advertising, it could be valuable. Lets say its unwrappings, those are for a toy and you can target ads to that. Thats a valuable context actual advertising. Those are the people who need advertising thats targeted. We say behavioral, its targeted to something other than the immediate context youre seeing. We only have a few minutes and there are a bunch of issues we want to talk about. I just want to go down the line here. If you could each of you tell the audience what the other Critical Issues you think they need to be aware of in this context . So to some extent, i think its out of the ftcs hands at this point. We saw from the previous role making, it took three years even if we sped it up, its probably at least another year and weve seen two major proposals at the federal level and we have the California Consumer protection act which has protections up to age 16. We have over in europe and Companies Like google who operate all over the world have to deal with the regime that has differing protections for kids under 16 to some extent, i think the key here is to provide as much insight about what laws creators in particular have to follow, but what that law should be and whether we should be more flexible. I feel like that battle at this point is almost lost and we should be talking about how to make it more practical for people who have to make these provisions. One of those sets of people are schools and educators. You work between the education policy, whats the very short version of that . That it is impossible. Many state laws have found and rolled back having an opt in regime saying that parents have to proactively consent to each and every thing because unfortunately, you dont always have engaged parents and in louisiana, parents or teachers going to parents homes and others and kids that missed out on being added to the state scholarship funds because they couldnt get parental signoffs, they couldnt get the signature. And so, its really important to remember that there are unintended consequences here and i think as i said, where were going with all of this and what weve seen with the student privacy protections is an underlying frame work of policy protections that apply across the board, not protections that parents have to consent to. And so, exactly what the boundaries of that are going to be, yet to be seen. Okay. Were in lightning round here because we need to leave some time for our chat with mr. Phillips. You opened up okay. So one thing that we havent spoken about i think is fascinating about the rule is that it governs the entire life cycle of personal information thats collected from an individual and i found kind of fascinating, your organizations comments, the idea of kind of the orphaned parts of the rule. That the data minimizization requirements and the security and confidentiality requirements, while theyre a key part of the rule, those parts havent been fleshed out as much as perhaps they could be to give Additional Guidance on the back end. This isnt even on the front end when youre talking about information collection, but what happens when you have that information, and how you protect the users information when you have it. So, thats a part that i think is interesting and i know theres been a lot of concern about how well notice and consent really works and weve had a long time to grapple with this rule. Its interesting to me that its been around for x number of years and people still at every concerns we talk to, were like, wow, the ftc should educate us more about it. You know, im not sure there are other laws that really have this kind of sense that people just, if they only knew more about it theyd comply better and why isnt there a better education. And you think thats because of the inherent applebmbiguitam . I have no idea, maybe because its complicated or the eco system in which it applies is constantly evolving. Okay. The last word, we had to wrap up here, so quickly down the line. Theres like a million issues with it, right . Which is why the ftc has a number of questions and probably the average numbers of pages of comments are about 15 to 20 for everyone that filed comments and yours is about 70. So i think theres an extraordinary number of issues, but i think to pull up a little bit. The question is its a notice and consent frame work and how do we create that without notice and fatigue so that were focusing people on that. How do we balance these really good protections with ensuring there is this nice diversity and democracy of content coming on and how do we get people who are complying in this post 2013 post settlement world information so they can do the right thing and those are my three high level points. I think the biggest ones for us would be the rebuttal presumption issue and clarity what is general and data minimimi minimizizatio minimizization. Ill dive into the weeds. And this particular issue you have to grapple with, Voice Recognition and speech recognition, the fact of the matter is, the way we interact with computers and Human Interfaces are changing very, very rapidly and what the ftc said in 2017, i think it was, was that voice collection was essentially a violation of copa, but they would not enforce so long as a voice pattern was collected, it was immediately the function for which it was requested would be gone and it would all be completely destroyed. Thats fine. The problem is that Companies Need a way of being able to fine tune their ai so they can actually understand child speech, which is very different than adult speech and so, essentially, we may be leaving our children behind, even though theyre the generation thats probably going to want to use Voice Recognition and voice interaction with computers so i think we really need to take a hard look about ways in which we can allow companies to better their ai and better their ability to do speech recognitions without recognizing individual voices and collecting that data. More on that in the tech freedom comments. Final word . I think the biggest problem is the whole model of notice and consent doesnt work anymore. Theres just people dont read privacy policies, even if they did, theyre not going to understand them and no one knows whats going on behind the scenes and how this information is put together and used by all of these Different Companies weve never heard of. So, i think that we have to and this will obviously take legislation, but move more to, you know, more data minimizization, but prohibiting certain uses of data and ill stop there. Okay, thank you very much to our panel. Its a pleasure to have all of you, im going to have commissioner phillips join me for a fireside chat and i want to note since we have an overwhelming overwhelmingly female panel, the podcast does interviews on ongoing women in tech series, if you havent listened to those episodes you might want to listen to that as well as others that she does. And commissioner phillips is going to come up and join me, so thank you. [applaus [applause] i got to know him as one of the most thoughtful and humorous people in washington. So, try not to set too high a bar for him today. And hes spoken several times about copia and how to interpret it. Thank you for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I just want to ask any initial reaction to any of the panels you heard today. And also ill note youre limited on what you can say you cant comment on pending proceedings, including the enforcement actions. I wont put you on the spot. And the caveat, what im saying, its not necessarily the views of my colleagues or the commission as a whole. Theres a lot said over the course of two panels, i think it was really interesting. I think there are two big mehta take aways that i take from it. The first is that these are complex issues and there is a tendency, i think, unfortunately in the context of the privacy debate, to simply say, privacy, thats a word, its good. I want more of it. But its rather like freedom, right . I want more freedom, too, but when youre talking in specifics and youre thinking about what the application of the principle is, your view of whether a particular law or enforcement is, may depend on what the specifics are. The first take away i have. The second take away is this, the initial or intuitive or first time you hear it appeal of a given policy position may not adequately take into account all of the follow on effects and the really interesting part of this tampa bay interesting part of this debate to me weve been talking about it, bubbling up in a way i dont believe weve seen in my lifetime. Certainly not outside the context of lets say national security. Fourth amendment, people are thinking about privacy a lot. Those issues tend to pop up more, but commercial data privacy. In my lifetime, i dont know that weve talked about these issues so much, but often times, like if you read the privacy project of the new york times, its a very onesided conversation. This is an instance where were seeing in life and in effect in peoples careers and their jobs, some of the costs of privacy. Were seeing a bit of balance in the way that were having a conversation here about copa thats interesting. And i think youre falling into your own trap, and you say that cost of privacy violates your first rule. Lets try to break it down more concretely into Component Parts and so, how should we think about privacy here when, in the copa context . What are the subcomponents that we should be looking at and trying to talk about more clearly . Well, the context of copa, i think, you know, weve got a law, right, and we talk a little about what animated the law in particular, and ill sort of pick on one of the earlier panels, we spend a lot of time talking about behavioral advertising and the persistent identifiers that enable it, to make it possible. We also spent a lot of time talking about things like comments. From the perspective of copa, the law, and sort of the and mating principles, those could be two very different things, right . The ability of someone to reach out to you, right, is much closer to what i think everyone agrees we were talking about in the context of copa whereas a persistent identifier, maybe you think the ftc got it right in 2013, maybe they didnt. But its something different. Okay. So your agency is reconsidering some of these fundamental questions. Is that potentially in scope to rethink the 2013 amendments . Do you think there might be ways to do a better job of what the f this. C did in 2013 . You said in the mix of the proceeding and we have taken in a great deal of input and i dont want to prejudge that question. Youre hearing people talk about these questions . Thats certainly something about which people are talking. I think what you can see right now is that the changes that can be made through rule making can have a tremendously large impact and thats really important to remember. Well, jim talked about this, the youtube settlement has had a tremendously large impact, but that wasnt done through rule making and it wasnt an opportunity for people to comment. Just as a procedural matter, how do you think the ftc should solicit Public Comment from affected parties before making changes like that. Would you want those things to go through rule making understanding that you do have to bring enforcement action. How do you decide when something requires Public Comment. To some extent its statutorily defined. So in youtube youre talking about a civil penalty enforcement action so its in federal court and a lot is administrative and you have that notice and comment capability. Fundamentally, a rule change requires under the law, depending on the context on which youre talking, in this context under the apa. Administrator procedure act, im sorry. Let me just add ago, whats interesting about a case like the youtube case or, you know, a case like the facebook case, and that was a preexisting order with the ftc, is when you do enforcement with platforms, things are almost by definition at scale which means theyre going to have a broad impact. If youre targeting a smaller entity, right, trying to think of a good example in the context of copa, the two weve done that are ticktock which are not small entities, but the ramifications of what youre doing arent necessarily as large. When you do anything with youtube much broader r ramificatio ramifications. And i read from the footnote from the 2013ftc order that specifically cited facebook and youtube as examples of general audience sites and said that copa wasnt going to apply unless there was actual knowledge and here we are without a rule change because of enforcement action and that hasnt changed. The ftc says this is not a general audience site, this has subcomponents, some of which could be directed to children and that subcomponent idea is in the statute, but it had never been applied before to channels on a website like that. So thats a pretty big change, and thats why were here and people are raising these concerns about a law thats now changed its application without Public Comment and that started january 1st, i believe, so theyre dealing with that, even as this rule making update is underway. So i argue, there are a number of Different Reasons were here. One is the statute. One is a rule making conducted under the statute. And another is a settlement reached in a case. And you heard this on the last panel. Another is the implementation of that settlement and in essence the settlement that says follow copa and the question, what does that mean . Theres both the settlement and implementation and another change and i think i heard a reference earlier, theres talk in congress about expanding copa. Two bills out there. Okay. So i want to move on to the big picture. Do you have anything else to say to content creators out there about how not specifics, but in general, in what way they are their input may be incorporated . So, i think the first thing is to say thanks. Like its very when youre doing Public Policy and youre thinking about policies that impact a wide variety of people its really important to hear from the people who are impacted and so i had the opportunity to meet two of the folks here not so long ago. Jeremy came to our copa workshop in terms of the rule making, but forest, he just made a video online where he kind of called us out and i think that kind of Citizen Engagement is really, really important. So youve got almost 850 875,000 signatures on that petition, parents, content creators, who might be affected by the settlement and then there were another 175,000 comments filed in the docket, there might be more, there were so many comments filed the regulations. Gov website cant keep up. Were not sure how many there are, but as far as i know, thats the most public attention that has been paid to an ftc proceeding, maybe ever, but maybe since the late 1970s, when the ftc tried to regulate the advertising of cereal to children. That prompted a big backlash. The washington post, and that prompted a furious response from congress, a Democratic Congress which really clipped the agencys wings, removed some of the rule making powers and briefly closed the agency. Does that parallel inform your thinking today . The short answer is yes. I think that the nature of the agency, lets step back from coppa for just a moment. The nation of the agency that our core jurisdiction is defined more or less by the word unfair and also by the word deceptive. Deceptive has a more understandable meaning, but the word unfair is a very big word. Right, it can capture a lot of things and most importantly, it can capture one thing for you and a different thing for me. Where you have legal authority, the instinct and under certain historical circumstances that tendency even to say, thats bad and i want to stop it and thats bad and i want to stop it and the other thing is bad and i want to stop it can be very strong. Letters come in a lot in particular for some of the people in this room like congress, i dont like this, you should stop it, i dont like that, you should stop it. And its almost always earnest. People are often genuinely concerned, but there is also a concern in running around without thinking very carefully doing effectively what is legislation. And so, our wings were sort of clipped for that, and as i sit here now, and i look out at the world, theres a big debate going on in congress right now about what kind of Rule Making Authority we should have. In privacy legislation . In privacy. That debate is about finding the sort of easier ap, administrative procedures act to privacy. Thats what we have in coppa. In 2013, whether you like it or not, putting persistent identifiers under the category of information that brings you subject to the requirements of coppa, including verified parental consent, that was a big change in the policy. When you give Rule Making Authority and you dont cabin that Rule Making Authority, there is a lot of room for agencies themselves to understand the policy. We get a lot of input from the public and thats really important, but thats a great deal of power. When you say dont when congress didnt cabin that authority. I said that earlier. Coppa listed, name, address, so on and said any other unique identifier the commission determines allows the contacting of the unique individual and that has been interpreted then to mean any cookie and therefore has brought behavioral advertising into the scope of coppa when that was a great surprise to many people. Yeah. So, thats the kind of discretion were talking about. You worked on the hill. You actually helped to write laws. What advice would you give to congress about how to think about how much of those decisions to keep to congress and how much to give to the tfc . So im an article one guy meaning i believe that fundamentally the best place where policy is made is congress and thats because they have a mandate to do it thats different from the kind of mandate that an agency has, any agent. Are you running for reelection this year . Its always hard to figure out that question. The answer is theres a thing called the hatch act and i dont get near the word election. Im not running for anything, i never will. But when you think as congress about what kind of policy we ought to have. There are going to be terrific moments of tension and maybe youre in a place where you just want to get a bill done. Its going to be really important to your boss, its going to be really important to the American Public what youre there, more specific constituency than that. But be wary of just delegating that authority to an elected bureaucrat. Theres a cost that comes to that and when people say, well, we want to provide flexibility and flexibility is good, right . Everybody likes flexibility. Its like privacy. But it also means that at the end of the day, many of the bigger decisions can be made by the agency and its up to congress to determine how that rule making ought to get made. Congress can put guardrails on how rule making goes on. Years ago we called the ftc, the federal technology commission. For better or worse it is the regulator of technology, whether you like the decision it makes or not. Youre going to be stuck with it. Its broad and openended and allows to regulate and a specific statute like coppa ends up getting triggered by technological change and comes along later and tasks you with a privacy or technological issue is out there. What did you learn besides the issue we discussed. What did you learn from the experience of coppa and how to think about the role in regulating technology and trying to stay ahead of the curve . So i think presuming that we as government can stay ahead of the curve, its quite a presumption. I think fundamentally the important lesson for me on coppa is that number one, its congress that sets the policy. And number two, that as our economy digitizes, right, and as the use of data becomes endemic and it is, its everywhere in the economy, the ramifications of the policy decisions are broader than you might realize. And you might have realized they were. There is a tendency in the privacy debate to talk about the economy as if its like four different firms, right . Its google, its apple, its fair and balanced, thats not true. Were talking tens of thousands all across the economy doing a wide variety of things, in terms of content creators, im getting to it. I dont know, whats the number . Its more than tens of thousands. Huge numbers of people are affected and thats just really important to take into account. What do you do with that . I mean, when you know that its not just four firms or even 40 firms, but its that long tail of hundreds of thousands of people who are creating content who have to worry about legal liability, what does that mean for a regulator and agency that takes enforcement actions, how do you provide them enough assurance they can decide, they can assure their spouse theyre not going to lose their home if the ftc comes after them and imposes some huge penalty on them, for example . I mean, look, i think we have to engage in the kind of conversation that everyone is having now. I think thats important. I think its incumbent upon us to explain through guidance, you know, what were doing. I think it is incumbent upon the bar and others to watch what were doing. I will say this, it isnt as if theres a record of enforcement action against content creators. I do want to add one note, actually and just something for people to think about. There was a lot of discussion that the guidance thats put out on what is directed to children, whether thats the right guidance, to the exit ent extent that you have a statute that looks at that. Its hard to define. Right. Weve talked also today about the problemics of setting a particular age, right . Thats the arbitrary line when it comes to kids. And beyond that, multifactor that weve been talking about, however open it is to judgment and judgment is something that we as Law Enforcement has to exercise, might be the right way to go about that, but that said, i think that listening, providing information to the public, i think thats really important. Just to close, you talked about the immediate for humility and thats admirable, but of course, many people in the congress, in the congress figured they could delegate hard questions to you at the federal trade commission and youll figure them out so they may be actually eager to right openended language that just kicks the can over to you. Thats a hard habit to break congress of. Is there anything that you can say to them besides just dont do that, dont trust us to make these decisions . How would you stiffen their spine and take more of those policy making decisions for themselves . I mean, i think i would just lets take today, right . Again, people have differing views on the rule making that we did in 2013, but its a big decision, right . Congress is good at making Big Decisions, its designed to make Big Decisions, its hard to legislate, but the fact that its hard to legislate shouldnt in any way say to someone and so you shouldnt do it, right . The scheme of our constitution is one that makes making Big Decisions for the whole of society that affect a wide variety of people difficult. But it requires basically is broad concensus. But thats okay because youre making law and law comes with teeth. So theres a democratic reason why congress ought to keep what it has, but theres another reason, too, and it has to do with the ability of firms in the economy to operate and people to plan their businesses Going Forward. There are things that agencies do that are sometimes not done with that level of broad concensus. Take, not to pick on our sister agency, but take Net Neutrality and what you can see over time, depending on the context is switches in policy. You want to adjust policy for the development of the economy so the development of technology, what you dont want is rules that change back and forth, depending when people are elected. Thats a level of uncertainty that makes Business Planning really hard. Avoiding the delegation problem, not allowing rule making, but making sure that the details better left to the agencies, but the policy decisions are made by congress, limits the degree to which the rules can change over time, and that allows for a certain st stasis, the more constant the rule is the easier it is to understand, both for people who want to make money and careers are at issue and the parents making decisions about their children and the people just going online and trying to figure out what to do. One of the most important themes we have in privacy discussion more broadly, is that people dont know whats going on. I cant count the number of times ive heard from legislators, to citizens, friends, whatever, we have no idea whats happening. The more complex the rule, the more the rule changes, the less you get that effect, like consistency, uniformity, allow for greater clarity and thats very important. So when you hear someone say, im going off on a tan gent. 50 different laws on this issue, think about the consumer. If youre thinking about the consumers ability to understand whats in, whats out, what do i have to raise my hand for . What are they going to when it comes to opt out and opt in. And the longer those policies are going to be, very important to have consistency, very important to have uniformity. Were at time, so, no, no, this is great. Were going to ive been at this for 11 years now and were going to do many more events on coppa and suppose that in four or five years, were doing another coppa event and play a video clip of you making some prediction, something that you want to communicate to that panel. If you had to pick one short thing to say to them, what would you say . Im not supposed to make those predictions. Well, what, if you wanted to have kind of like see i told you so, here is how you should have thought about this, here is the thing i really tried to emphasize back in 2020, what would that one thing be . I think the thing id say were not going to answer all the questions, theres no coppa, no federal privacy law, the sense that they would understand everything going on in the economy as a whole and theres no application of any of these things that wont have an effect. So, im not sure thats a prediction, but im not really good at predicting so i try to avoid it. Like the star wars franchise, coppa will never end. It will keep going and ups and downs and well be here and hope youll be here for the future events. Thanks, commissioner phillips for coming today. And thanks for experts who came today. Stay tuned, eventually well get an update from the ftc, i imagine second quarter, dont want to put you on the spot. Something will happen and when it does there will be what it means for content creators, thank you all for coming and all of us to stay here and engage with you, if you have any questions. Thank you to our live audience, you can find our past discussions with coppa, and cspan also covered and also online and put those up on youtube and watch those from start to finish and see how the characters relate to each other and long arcs of revenge in the star wars privacy. Thank you. Thanks for having me. [applause]. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] the house votes today on impeachment managers and will send the articles against President Trump on abuse of power and obstruction of congress to the senate for a trial. One of the first actions by house managers will be walking the articles from the house to the senate. Before the end of the week, Supreme Court chief Justice John Roberts is expected to be sworn in as the presiding officer for the trial and senators will take an oath as jurors. Former senator barbara mu mullcowski spoke about the oath she took during the clinton impeachment trial. 100 to render impartial justice. The chief justice of the Supreme Court presided as the chief judge. At this time i will administer the oath to all senators in the chamber in conformance with articles 1 section 3 clause 6 of the constitution and the Senate Impeachment rule. To be sure that no vote will be partied you take an oath three times to render impartial justice one as a group. So help you god. Then as individual. Ms. Macullski. I do. And then you go to the well and sign a book for all of history where i hear by, u. S. Senator from maryland, do pledge to render impartial justice on matter of impeachment. Now, you know, your hand shakes with that kind of historical and immediate commitment. The impeachment of President Trump today, the house votes on impeachment manager, sending the article from abuse of power and obstruction of congress to the senate. Follow the process live on cspan on demand at cspan. Org impeachment and listen on the free cspan radio app. This afternoon at 5 p. M. Eastern we expect the senate to receive the articles of impeachment
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.