Company: IHETW
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001400891-25-000009
Chunk: 26

Company: iHeartMedia, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-27
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 26
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 information from and about our employees and our business partners.

We are subject to a number of federal, state and foreign laws and regulations relating to consumer protection, direct marketing, information security, data protection and privacy, including children's privacy. While some of these laws and regulations are still evolving, they have impacted, and will continue to impact our business by restricting our marketing activities and collection, use, retention, sharing and other processing of data, including both personal information and technical information related to users and devices, which also reduces our ability to effectively deliver relevant ads to our users, and by increasing compliance cost and risks. For example, the Federal Trade Commission and state regulators enforce a variety of data privacy issues, such as promises made in privacy policies or failures to appropriately protect information about individuals, as unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act or similar state laws. 

Comprehensive state privacy laws are now in effect in multiple states, and additional states have passed laws that will take effect throughout the coming years. These new privacy laws establish data privacy rights for consumers residing in the respective states (such as rights to request deletion or correction of their personal information, or access to a copy of their personal information), impose new assessment requirements prior to undertaking higher risk data processing, grant opt-out rights (or require opt-in consent) for the collection and use of sensitive data, impose special rules on the collection of personal information from minors, create notice obligations and new limits on targeted advertising and the “sale” of personal information or the “sharing” of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and create a statutory damages framework that allows for state regulators to impose fines and penalties for violations. Several states have laws making it easier for consumers to opt-out of targeted advertising and sales or sharing of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising by requiring use of the "global privacy control." If the global privacy control were to be widely adopted, it could materially impact our ability to deliver targeted advertising and generate advertising revenue therefrom. Compliance with these new laws entails substantial expenses, diverts resources from other initiatives and projects, and could limit the services we are able to offer. In the United States, certain of our business operations are subject to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”), which limits what personal information we can collect directly from users of our Platforms who are under the age of 13 years, and how we can use that information.

In the area of information security and data breach notification, various laws and regulations in the United