The Federal Trade Commission yesterday announced settlements with the operators of three Web sites for violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
The FTC charged the operators of girlslife.com, bigmailbox.com and insidetheweb.com with collecting personally identifiable information from children younger than 13 without parental consent.
The settlements were the first civil penalty cases brought by the FTC since COPPA went into effect on April 21, 2000.
COPPA requires Web sites that collect information from children younger than 13 to obtain parental consent and to post privacy policies.
To settle the charges, the operators of the three sites will share civil penalties of $100,000. They also must delete all personally identifiable information collected from children over the past year.
All future data collection by the three sites must comply with COPPA.
