Last week, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC")
released a policy enforcement statement to provide additional
guidance under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
("COPPA") for organizations that use audio voice
recordings of children. This additional guidance builds on the
FTC's 2013 updates to COPPA that brought additional data types,
such as photographs, videos and audio files containing images of
children or their voices, under COPPA's regulatory
authority.
This "non-enforcement policy" confirms for the
industry and the public what the FTC has been telling individual
companies in response to individual inquires: namely, that the FTC
is not interested in enforcing COPPA where an application or
internet-enabled device allows children to make voice commands in
place of written inputs to perform a search or fulfill a verbal
instruction or request, so long as the operator maintains the data
file for a very brief time period necessary for that purpose and
none
