Colorado AG Seeks Pre-Rulemaking Comment on Kids Privacy Regulations
The Colorado attorney general's office is seeking comments ahead of a planned rulemaking to implement kids privacy rules, it said Thursday. It must make rules to implement a 2024 bill (SB 24-041) that amended the Colorado Privacy Act to enhance protections for processing minors’ data.
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“Though a formal notice-and-comment rulemaking has not begun, the Department of Law welcomes initial input from the community to better understand the public’s thoughts and concerns about rules related to SB 24-041,” said an emailed rulemaking update. Stakeholders must submit pre-rulemaking comments by July 11.
The department wants “informal input from all members of the public about any aspect of the Department’s upcoming rulemaking regarding the Children’s Privacy Amendment,” said a document on pre-rulemaking considerations. If it proposes draft rules, the department will release a rulemaking notice and a copy of the draft proposal on the Colorado state secretary's website; the rulemaking phase would include a formal hearing and another round of comments, it said.
The department seeks to implement the kids privacy amendment in a way that promotes consumer rights, clarifies ambiguities, aims for interoperability, allows for innovation and facilitates “efficient and expeditious compliance,” it said.
The department listed targeted questions related to system design features:
- "What is a system design feature?
- What is the threshold for 'significantly' increasing, sustaining, or extending a minor’s use of the online service, product, or feature? How should this threshold be measured?
- How should countervailing measures be evaluated, if at all? For example, a prompt that encourages users to take a break after scrolling for a certain amount of time.
- What are examples of practices that significantly increase, sustain, or extend a minor’s use of the online service, product, or feature?
- What constitutes consent of a minor or consent of a child’s parent or legal guardian?
- What methods work best for obtaining consent from a minor, or a child’s parent or legal guardian?"
In addition, the department asked specific questions about how to determine if a controller “willfully disregards” that someone is a minor:
- "What factors should contribute to the evaluation of when a controller should be considered to 'willfully disregard' that a consumer is a minor?
- How does age and/or [identity] verification affect a determination that a controller willfully disregarded that a consumer was a minor?
- How should the target audience of content or a website impact the presumption that the viewer is a minor?"