Creating a kid-friendly identity ecosystem
27 December, 2013
category: Corporate, Digital ID, Government
Privacy Vaults Online, commonly known as PRIVO, was established in 2001 to enable web sites to comply with the Children’s online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
“We embarked on building the tools necessary for companies to comply with the law – tools built around identity management,” says Denise Tayloe, PRIVO co-founder and CEO. Additionally, the company has been authorized to certify compliance with COPPA.
PRIVO was a finalist for the first round of NSTIC awards last year, but didn’t make the cut. This year, Tayloe and her crew dug deeper and found more than 50 relying parties willing to participate. They also found some larger technology partners.
“We brought more muscle this go round. The other thing that’s happened is that COPPA went through a major review,” explains Tayloe. “In December of this past year, it hit the mainstream. COPPA 2.0 brought in mobile, third party advertising networks and social sharing. It added pictures, video and audio as Personally Identifiable Information.”
Keeping up with a child’s online activity can be difficult. “Parents are inundated. They’re overwhelmed. They don’t exactly understand what’s going on,” Tayloe says. “So there’s a big opportunity for education here and for kids to sort of drag their parents into the identity ecosystem and let them get some good lessons in the name of protecting their children.”
They’ll start by establishing a Minors Trust Framework by the end of the first year. This will create an online identity trust model compliant with COPPA 2.0 and other nuances around children. “We’ll certify a diverse set of identity providers that are compliant with the model at a certain level of assurance,” Tayloe explains. “We’re going to establish secure and privacy-enhancing identity credentials that actually bind children to their parents so that they can be used within our Global Kid Network and foster adoption by a broad array of identity ecosystem participants to help advance the initiative.”
PRIVO will also create a children’s identity and parental consent management platform – the Parents Hub – that supports the Global Kid ID Network. “That’s going to enable parents to easily permission their child to access Minors Trust Framework-approved online services and applications,” Tayloe says. “It’s going to eliminate the need for multiple user name and passwords across these different sites and prevent the sort of correlation and linking and tracking of child data across the Internet, but still enable business to communicate products and services and engage in an interactive way.”
The company was awarded $1.6 million for the first year of the pilot. If all the milestones are met, it will receive about the same amount for year two. By the end of the second year, PRIVO plans to protect at least 10 million children via the Kid Identity Network.
“I think that we have a lot of opportunity in front of us if we get this right,” Tayloe adds. “This is a protected demographic that we have a lot of experience with, and I think that we’re going to show that we are the right organization for this very specific space.”
