Children’s data privacy has been a hot topic in recent months, but how exactly does our children’s privacy rights stand against the world?
In the U.S. policymakers still largely rely on COPPA, a law built for children under 13, which hinges on parental consent and notice but leaves teens largely unprotected. Newer federal rules and recent state efforts are pushing towards age verification and strict rules, but the result is a patchwork rather than a coherent system.
Elsewhere around the world, the trend is ticking towards treating children and teens as a distinct, high-risk group throughout their digital lives. The EU’s GDPR sets a consent age of around 16 years old, while the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code demands privacy-by-default, high-privacy settings, and limits on profiling and targeted ads for children online. India, Australia, and Brazil have all adopted or are advancing “kids-code”-style regimes that require verifiable parental consent, privacy-by-default, strong age-verification, and clear bans on practices like tracking and manipulative design.
While the U.S. is slowly catching up through state laws and COPPA updates, most other jurisdictions are ahead. They recognize that protecting children’s data isn’t just about consent, it’s about how products are designed, what data is collected, and how young people are treated as digital citizens.
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