The White House will add special privacy protections for children to its blueprint on electronic commerce, senior adviser to the president Ira Magaziner said Wednesday.
"The privacy of children can be compromised on the Internet," Magaziner said at a Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in Burlingame, California. "Even though my 10-year-old can work the Internet better than I can, children need special privacy protections."
Magaziner is heading up a task force on electronic commerce as part of the Clinton administration's effort to address both emerging and long-ignored Net issues. In January, the task force issued a white paper for public comment on e-commerce concerns such as privacy, censorship, intellectual property, encryption, and tariffs. The task force is now working on a new version of the proposal, which will likely be issued by the president in April, Magaziner said.
In recent weeks, the Federal Trade Commission released suggestions regarding children's privacy online. The agency said children are more likely to divulge personal information than adults, and are especially prone to marketing schemes.
Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation giving kids further protection against marketers by making it a crime to sell kids' personal information without their parents' consent. But privacy advocates say older minors should retain privacy rights to conduct online transactions away from the prying eyes of parents.
Magaziner did not say what specific privacy guarantees for children would be included in the white paper.
On other e-commerce issues, Magaziner reiterated the White House's position of advocating an international policy that would "let people buy and sell freely."
When broaching the hotly contested issue of encryption export, Magaziner said only that the White House is "trying to evolve our position on encryption." Currently, the White House does not allow companies to export more than 56-bit encryption because of law-enforcement concerns that the technology could be used by international terrorist groups and other criminal enterprises. But opponents of the policy say the White House can never have the truly free-market approach to e-commerce that Magaziner envisions while retaining strict export controls on computer-security technologies.
