POCKET: A tool for protecting children's privacy online

Children's privacy in the online environment has become critical. Use of the Internet is increasing for commercial purposes, in requests for information, and in the number of children who use the Internet for casual web surfing, chatting, games, schoolwork, e-mail, interactive learning, and other applications. Often, websites hosting these activities ask for personal information such as name, e-mail, street address, and phone number. In the United States, the children's online privacy protection act (COPPA) of 1998 was enacted in reaction to widespread collection of information from children and subsequent abuses identified by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). COPPA is aimed at protecting a child's privacy by requiring parental consent before collecting information from children under the age of 13. To date, however, the business practices used and the technical approaches employed to comply with COPPA fail to protect children's online privacy effectively. In this paper, we describe the design of an automated tool for protecting children's online privacy, called POCKET (Parental Online Consent for Kid's Electronic Transactions). The POCKET framework is a novel, technically feasible and legally sound solution to automatically enforce COPPA. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.