Your Child's AI Tutor Is Building a Profile. COPPA Wasn't Written for This.

In 2023, the FTC fined Amazon $25 million for COPPA violations related to Alexa's storage of children's voice recordings. The fine was the largest in COPPA's 25-year history. Amazon's total revenue that year was $575 billion. The fine represented 0.004% of revenue — four thousandths of one percent. This is children's privacy enforcement in the age of AI. What COPPA Actually Says The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1998. It requires websites and online services to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13. It requires companies to maintain a privacy policy, let parents review and delete their children's data, and not condition participation on disclosure of more data than necessary. COPPA was written for the dial-up internet era. It was designed to stop websites from collecting children's email addresses without permission. It was not designed for: AI tutoring systems that build detailed models of a child's le