US Senate advances COPPA 2.0 child privacy bill with new age verification requirements

The US Senate on 26 September 2024 moved forward legislation to overhaul the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, raising the age of consent from 13 to 17 and requiring platforms to obtain parental consent before collecting data from minors, disable targeted advertising to users under 17 by default, and provide parents with tools to supervise their children's online activity. COPPA 2.0 also mandates that platforms assess and mitigate risks to minors including exposure to sexual exploitation, bullying and mental health harms, with enforcement authority vested in the Federal Trade Commission.

Legislative mandates for parental controls and risk mitigation place the emphasis on operational capability rather than access restriction. Systems that detect patterns of targeting, escalation and coercion in direct messages equip parents and platforms to intervene when a child faces grooming, sextortion or abuse without monitoring every conversation or restricting legitimate social connection. As a world-leading AI online-safety platform, Guardii surfaces the shape and seriousness of a conversation in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, with detection modules for grooming, sextortion, CSAM including AI-generated material, and cyberbullying, blocking hostile contact before it reaches the target and enabling rapid escalation to a parent, school or authority when a young person is in acute distress.