The Association urges the FTC to do everything in its power to protect our children from Web sites that pry and collect personal information without the careful review by and the permission from parents or guardians. Schools are exceedingly sensitive, insisting on parental consent in the form of a personal written signature for many of our undertakings with our students. We feel that commercial Web sites should follow this procedure as well. This permission should include a parent's signature mailed or faxed to the Web site. Students do this for schools and rarely is there an incident of forging parent signatures among young children.
Children can too easily click on an e-mail response without their parents' knowledge.
Thus, the process of getting the form from the Web site, which may lead to a discussion between parent and child, then signing and sending it in an envelope with a postage stamp, or going to a fax machine to send the form, we believe is more likely to lead to parental involvement in the decision whether or not to give consent to data collection from children.