Glossary term
Children's Data Protection
Subject: Technology, Cyber and Data, Data Protection and Privacy
Also known as: Minors' data protection, Children's privacy
Children's data protection is the set of stricter rules and extra care applied when organisations collect or use personal data about minors, including age checks and parental consent for online services.
Explanation
Laws treat children as less able to understand how their data is used, so they add duties. Common features are a minimum age below which a parent or guardian must agree, with some way to check that the person agreeing really is the parent. Notices must be written in language a child can follow. Many regimes also limit profiling, targeted advertising and tracking of minors, and expect services likely to be used by children to have high-privacy settings by default. The age of digital consent varies by country, commonly between 13 and 16. Examples include the GDPR's rules on children, the UK's Age Appropriate Design Code and the US children's online privacy law. India's DPDP Act also requires verifiable parental consent. A service that ignores the age of its users invites regulator attention and forced design changes.
Example
A mobile game studio finds that a large share of its players are under 14. Its privacy team adds an age prompt at sign-up, asks a parent to confirm consent by a verified channel for younger users, turns off personalised advertising for them, and rewrites its privacy notice in short, plain sentences.