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Floor Speech

We have fought to extend COPPA's protections to teenagers, since it only covers kids under age 13 today, and to ban targeted advertising that pushes unwanted products on kids. Congress has been a tough place to pass anything when it comes to kids and tech.

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

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

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

Until now.

In 2010, we called COPPA ``woefully out of date.''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

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

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, today is a historic day. Today the U.S. Senate will vote on the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which includes my legislation with Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA 2.0.

With this vote, the U.S. Senate will finally send a message to Big Tech that the days of indiscriminately tracking and targeting children and teens are over in our country; that their privacy-invasive business model must change; that young people and their parents are more important than shareholders' bank accounts.

This vote is long overdue. On June 20, 1996--June 20, 1996--more than 28 years ago, at the dawn of the information age, when only birds tweeted and ``the gram'' was simply a measurement, I stood before the House of Representatives and warned about the internet's unique threat to user privacy.

I stated then, in 1996, that the internet would allow corporate America to have the ``opportunity to track the clickstream of a citizen of the Net, to sneak corporate hands into a personal information cookie jar and use [that] database to compile sophisticated, highly personal consumer profiles of people's hobbies, buying habits, financial information, health information, who they contact or converse with, when and for how long.'' The internet would allow ``digital desperadoes to roam the [internet] frontier unchecked.''

Two years later, Congress enacted my Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA--that was 1998--and it was for kids under the age of 13. That is all I could get in 1998--protections for kids under 13, in our country--knowing that there was going to be an effort by corporate America to exploit those children.

Now, how did I know that? I knew it because I had been chairman over telecommunications in the 1980s, when the television industry was targeting kids with advertising on Saturday morning cartoons, Saturday morning programs.

They were pretty much turning all the programs into one big ad targeted at vulnerable kids. And so I had to author the Children's Television Act of 1990 in order to put protections for television on the books. But then, as the internet evolved, the marketers, the targeters all moved over from television over to the internet. And with it, Congress has to follow them in order to pass the laws to protect children, to protect teenagers from being exploited by the very same marketers, the very same companies that sought to exploit them on television.

And as I explained back then, the original COPPA, or the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, can be summarized in three words: ``disclosure,'' ``knowledge,'' and ``no''--disclosure of privacy policies, knowledge of information collected on our children, and no to the sale of the information. That information should only be used for the purposes for which the young person and their family had intended it.

So COPPA put real safeguards on the internet, at least for kids under the age of 13. But over the last 26 years, the Federal Trade Commission has brought dozens of cases against both household names, like Google, TikTok, and even Mrs. Fields Cookies, and lesser known entities. And during that period, the Federal Trade Commission has collected over half a billion dollars in fines for violations of COPPA, of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

The original COPPA law has done a lot of good. But as the years have passed and technology has evolved, our online world, once again, started to look like the Wild West with the desperadoes in charge, exploiting teenagers, exploiting children, using algorithms--powerful algorithms--to target those kids.

So, in 2011, I introduced my children and teens' privacy bill to update COPPA. And in every Congress since, I have continued to introduce that legislation, slowly developing coalitions, answering questions, building support to modernize and update COPPA to protect children and teens' privacy online.

And it can no longer be under the age of 13. Now we have to move it up to age 16 because we can see very clearly the targeting that goes on by these companies, the exploitation of the young people in our country, and the vulnerability of that group of Americans under the age of 17 who, according to the Surgeon General, according to the CDC, are in a mental health crisis in our country. And social media has been implicated by the Surgeon General, by the CDC, as one of the principal causes of this mental health crisis in our country.

And while knowledge and disclosure and no may have been effective during the early internet era, today, that formula needs to be modified. The no must now be no, no, no; and that is the foundation of COPPA 2.0--no targeted advertising toward children and teenagers in our country, no excessive data collection of information of teens and children, no deliberately ignoring young users.

For over a decade, I have been fighting for these essential privacy protections. In fact, if COPPA 2.0 were a person, it would have just turned 13 and would have aged out of COPPA's critical privacy protections, and that is unacceptable.

I introduced it in 2011, but the power of those tech industries has blocked that progress that we needed. Yes, you want all the good things from the internet, but there is a Dickensian quality to the internet. It is the best of technologies and the worst of technologies simultaneously. It can enable; it can ennoble. But it can also degrade; it can debase.

And we must put these protections in because we know that these companies have been exploiting their ability to reach children and teenagers all across our country and, largely, unencumbered by any restrictions whatsoever.

I know that privacy can sometimes seem as an elusive concept because strong privacy rules sound great in theory, but what does that mean in practice? Well, with COPPA 2.0, here is what privacy is going to mean: It is going to mean privacy will put an end to the manipulative, personalized ads that trick young people into purchasing unwanted goods and services.

Privacy means stopping a search engine or social media site from collecting a teenager's eye color or location or other information which has nothing to do with why that young person had gone online in the first place. It is none of that company's business.

And it also means giving teens or parents an eraser button to delete a social media post--to tell the company: ``Delete all that information you have gathered about me, a teenager''; or, as a parent, ``that you have collected about my child. Erase it all.''

And that right will be in the hands of the young person. It will be in the hands of the parent to just say: No, stop it. Stop collecting that information and delete whatever you have. Erase it.

So there will be an eraser button so a youthful mistake doesn't last forever.

So that is going to be a big home run, too, when we pass this legislation, to move the power over to the parents and to the young people. And, most importantly, privacy means a fighting chance for parents and young people who are struggling against trillion-dollar platforms looking for every way to keep kids and teens on their app.

Today, with passage of COPPA 2.0, the Senate takes a momentous step to stand up to the Big Tech lobbying machine; to stop the privacy- invasive business model that exploits young people for profit; to give our high-tech regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, the tools to tame our modern, digital desperadoes who are out there trying to exploit young people in our country.

With AI supercharging Big Tech's algorithms and encouraging platforms to collect more data on young people, it has never been more important to protect our young people's privacy. With this vote, the Senate is finally meeting that moment.

When I was a boy and I was home with my mother and with my two brothers--and I would be 10 years old, 9 years old--a salesman would ring the doorbell, and my mother would tell me: Just go to where the letter opener is in the door and tell the salesman that your mother is not home.

And I would. And then I would go to my mother and say: But you are home.

And she would say: I am not home to him. He is not getting in our living room. It is 11 in the morning. We are not having a stranger in our living room with you and three small children. It is just not happening.

Well, that same sense of privacy is still present in American families, in America's mothers and fathers. They don't want strangers in their living rooms, in their kitchens, in their bedrooms, with their children.

And what has happened is that, in the internet age, those same salesmen have been able to get around that front door. They have been able to get into the lives of the children, of the teenagers in our country, in ways that the parents have had great difficulty in controlling.

And so what we are going to say here today on the floor of the Senate is no. We are going to change this balance of power. We are going to hand it over to the parents, hand it over to the children and the teenagers, so that we can just say to those salesmen, those digital salesmen, those digital desperadoes trying to take advantage of young people in our country: No, you cannot get in. You cannot compromise the well-being of the young people in this family.

So that is what this vote is all about. It is historic. It is long overdue. It was pretty clear what the business model of these companies was going to be long ago at the dawn of the era.

I was the Democratic author of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that moved America from analog to digital, from narrowband to broadband. Not one company in America had broadband in February of 1996, but it was all predictable.

The pediatricians in our country said: We must put protections in for this new digital world in 1996.

So it was highly predictable.

Those who cared about the well-being of children, of teenagers were saying it all back then. Nothing is new.

So today is a historic day, and we thank all of our partners for working with us and all of the outside groups who have dedicated their time, their effort, their resources to getting this bill to the Senate floor.

I am deeply grateful to Senator Schumer for his partnership and leadership on this issue, to Chairwoman Cantwell, to Ranking Member Ted Cruz, and to my partner Senator Cassidy from Louisiana. In 1998, COPPA 1.0 was a partnership between myself and Billy Tauzin from Louisiana, and, today, with Senator Cassidy, we are going to take COPPA 2.0, partner it with the legislation of Senator Blumenthal and the Senator from Tennessee, and we are going to make history. And then we are going to get it over the finish line and onto the President's desk before the end of this year.

So I thank all the Members for their cooperation on this, and, again, I want to thank Senator Schumer for his great effort in expediting the movement of this legislation to the floor and for, I believe, its inexorable, inevitable passage.

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