Today the US Senate unanimously passed proposed legislation called COPPA 2.0. The measure, fully named the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act, aims to create new protections for young users online, such as preventing platforms from collecting their personal data without consent.
COPPA 2.0 is a modernized version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which attempts to address recent changes in common online activities, such as targeted advertising, that may prove harmful to minors. Lawmakers have made several efforts to pass this bipartisan bill. Although it has made varying amounts of progress in the Senate, no COPPA 2.0 bill to date has advanced beyond the House of Representatives. Industry groups like NetChoice have previously opposed COPPA 2.0 and other measures related to the online activity of minors such as KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act. NetChoice members include Google, YouTube, Meta, Reddit, Discord, TikTok and X. However, Google has changed its stance to specifically support COPPA 2.0.
“This bill expands existing law protecting our children online to ensure that companies cannot collect personal information from anyone under the age of 17,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement about the latest result. “This is a huge step forward to protect our children. We hope the House can join us. They haven’t done that yet.”
However, there has been a major pressure domestically and internationally to impose restrictions on when and how young people engage online. Several states – some like Utah, California, and Washington – have enacted laws that require some level of age verification, either to access mature content online or to use social media apps. Many of these efforts have raised privacy concerns about where and how people’s personal information is stored and protected. COPPA 2.0 could benefit from the privacy debate because it emphasizes giving teens and parents ways to protect their data from being used against them, rather than asking adults to give up data to use the Internet as usual.
Update, March 6, 2026, 11:38 am ET: Article updated with additional references on Google.
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