Students from Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Mass., including Emily Woodward, above, said they all use the Internet regularly, but they do not ask for parental permission. (Mattias Gugel/Medill)

WASHINGTON — The Republican and Democrat who head the Congressional Privacy Caucus are leading an effort to pass a bill that would tighten regulations on companies collecting personal information about children online, specifically focusing on mobile communications and targeted advertising.

The Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011 is an attempt to update online protections already established for children in The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Congress passed COPPA in 1998 as an attempt to protect the personal information of children online, but it does not address privacy issues that have arisen from new technology over the last dozen years.

So, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced a bill that would require the Federal Communications Commission to enforce guidelines limiting the capability of websites, mobile providers or advertisers to use personal data of children 13 and younger.

At a news conference announcing the bill, Markey and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, both expressed concern over children’s online activities that could harm their well-being and future careers

Markey said people should not be denied jobs because of a picture they posted when they were younger.  He also said that a girl who searches one time for weight loss information should not be targeted with weight-loss ads every time she goes online because a company has profiled her as a young female interested in weight loss.

This bill would stop companies from tracking minors online without the consent of parents, and it would restrict the use of targeted advertising. This measure also proposes an “eraser button” that would allow parents to remove any information about their child stored on the Web.

“Parents deserve to know what types of information are being collected about their kids online and how it is being used,” said Barton, a co-sponsor of the bill. “If you don’t like what you learn – our bill will give you the authority to change it with just the click of a mouse.”

As mobile communications become more popular, this bill aims to protect children who uses mobile devices to communicate, such as cell phones and tablets, many of which have tracking components.

Emma Llanso, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said she appreciates the bipartisan attention this bill has received, but she believes all Internet users should get the proposed protections, regardless of age. She said the spirit of the Do Not Track Kids Act is good, but the bill could lead to mandatory age verification, increased collection of personal information from Internet users and the infringement of teenagers’ rights to access lawful speech online.

Actor Nick Cannon, celebrity spokesman for Common Sense Media, a group that advocates for children’s safe use of technology, spoke in support of the bill at the hearing. He said that even if COPPA is updated to better regulate companies gathering information on the Internet, parents still need to check what their children are doing online.

“Most at that age don’t have the judgment or the maturity to protect themselves from those capable of taking advantage of them by tracking their whereabouts on the Internet,” the America’s Got Talent host said. “Parental supervision should extend from the playground to the internet.”

Facebook requires that its members be at least 13 years old, but that does not prevent underage minors from signing up by saying they’re older and using the social network. According to a Consumer Reports study released last May, 7.5 million Facebook users in the U.S. are under the age of 13; 5 million are under 10.

Children under 13 who post information on Facebook that can be viewed publicly foil safeguards afforded by COPPA, which prohibits sites from knowingly disclosing children’s personally identifiable information.

Eighth graders from Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Mass., attended the hearing to see their congressman, Markey, during a class trip to Washington. At the end of the news conference, they were asked to raise their hands if they use the Internet on a daily basis — all of the students’ hands went up. But when asked how many asked for parental permission, none raised their hands.

Student Mimi Connors, 14, said after the hearing that privacy on the Internet is not a problem she faces right now, but she might care “maybe when I’m older.”

Children ages 8 to 18 spend an average of an hour and a half online daily, an increase of 45 percent from five years prior, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation in January 2010. Cell phone ownership also has increased dramatically, growing from 39 percent of 8- to 18-year-olds in 2004 to 66 percent in 2009.

“Tracking our most vulnerable, our young children, must be outlawed and I am delighted that Congress is finally taking the necessary action with the Do Not Track Kids Act,” said Cannon, a father of 10-month-old twins. “The bipartisan effort demonstrates that the two parties can actually agree on at least one thing — the safety of our children. Kids make up 20 percent of our population but 100 percent of our future.”

In late April, at the annual Facebook developer conference in San Francisco, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a pilot program with Yelp, Microsoft Docs and Pandora to “personalize” user experiences using information from Facebook profiles.  All users are automatically opted-in to this setting.  The company also launched social plug-ins for all websites where users can log in using their Facebook usernames to see friends’ activity on that given website.

In response, some top Google engineers deactivated their accounts and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) requested the Federal Trade Commission to review the policies and mandate privacy protections.  Although several of the site’s members have complained in online forums, a majority of users remain unaware until they log on to a partner site.  Facebook did not respond to requests to discuss these new tools.

“It’s clear that Facebook has proven its willingness to change its privacy policy but it isn’t always as clear about what that means,” said Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate for enhanced online privacy.

Making Facebook ubiquitous with the Web has long been cited as the ultimate goal by the organization’s top executives, but the challenge is balancing this desire with privacy protections.  Its critical mass of users prevents people from deactivating accounts, mitigating the threat of a mass exodus, and perhaps tipping the scale towards less privacy.

“Facebook knows that there is a lot they can do before people are willing to walk away,” said Chris Hoofnagle, lecturer in residence at UC Berkeley School of Law.

In the 1990s the Clinton government decided to let marketplace competition drive the development of online privacy policies, assuming the best practice would rise to the top.  This policy also assumed consumers would educate themselves on each website’s privacy policy before deciding whether to stay or provide personal information.

Instead, consumers never paid attention – perhaps they assumed the government had mandated protections – leading to an absence of competition, and in some cases, a complete aversion to the notion itself.

“We’ve seen in recent years an insistence, mainly among technology companies, that young people don’t care about [privacy] anymore,” said Hoofnagle.

But a study released mid-April, co-authored by Hoofnagle, refutes these claims, showing that youth – regardless of their activity on social networking sites – value privacy as much as their elders.  And, interestingly, these youth behave online under an assumption of more privacy than actually exists.

In the survey, conducted jointly by UC Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania, individuals were asked to rate nine statements as true or false.  The statements were all true, and referenced the right of firms to sell and use consumer data without asking for explicit permission.  This came as a surprise to most youth surveyed, as 88 percent answered two or less correctly.

Protection of privacy has historically been associated with government and issues of surveillance, but private sector companies now hold so much personal data and raises questions about how much private information is available to other people and to advertisers.

“You don’t necessarily know what kind of sophisticated assessments people can make with the information you put out there,” said Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, citing a popular study where MIT researchers identified an individual’s sexual orientation by piecing together disparate pieces of online data.  According to Jeschke people need to complete a “gut check” on new tools and policies to ensure they are comfortable with how much personal information enters the public sphere.

The policy options going forward on advertising are unclear, Hoofnagle said.  The key issue of contention will be the advertising industry’s desire to collect all information on consumer behavior online – which sites are visited, in what order, for how long and which content is accessed – and giving consumers the right to not be tracked at all.

Today, consumers can opt-out of tailored advertising through networks like the Network Advertising Initiative, but that does not mean you are no longer being tracked.  It only means that you will not be subjected to the advertisements.

“They want to be able to collect everything as a principle,” Hoofnagle said.  “The [personal privacy] control mantra is a bit loaded.  What if control means I don’t want to be tracked at all? I think they would say no.”

Perhaps it’s the articles earlier this month in the New York Times and MarketingVOX about how coupons can be traced directly back to the person who used it. Or a story that Orayb Aref Najjar, a journalism professor at Northern Illinois University who specializes in cyber-communities and freedom of the press, said she recently read about how the information collected from a person is then interpreted and can be used against them.

“If you buy certain products … that means you are likely to pay your mortgage on time,” Najjar said in an e-mail. “So the information they collect about you is not neutral, and is not there to serve you … but to be bundled and sold …

“What worries me most is not the information gathered (governments always do that), but the extent and volume of information gathered and collated from different sources, and the way it may be interpreted. I worry about the competency of the interpreters. The issue becomes more crucial when it comes to information gathered internationally.”

Jay Stanley, public education director of ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, said Americans do not understand “the extent to which the information they give to one institution is stored, used, traded and combined.”

Yes, people willingly give out information to online stores and social networks. But some people also give out information unwillingly, Stanley said. They would rather not share their Social Security number and other personal information just because it’s required on some form.

Either way, Stanley says the consequences of that information sharing is mostly invisible to the individual. But over time, it is becoming more apparent how that information is being used, he said.

The ACLU is part of the Digital Due Process coalition, along with Google, AT&T, Microsoft, and technology and privacy groups, to get Congress to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Though the changes are not expected to drastically affect information gathering for the purposes of national security and marketing, Stanley said it is a stop toward making sure there is a proper process in place to broadly protect online privacy.

“With changes in technology, the substantive privacy we’ve always enjoyed is rapidly eroding,” Stanley said.