Legislation has been reintroduced by Rep. Robert Franks (R-NJ) that would prohibit list companies from distributing personal information about children without parental consent.
It’s the third time that the New Jersey Republican has introduced the Children’s Privacy Protection and Parental Empowerment Act which died in committee last year with the expiration of the 105th Congress and in 1996 when the 104th Congress passed into history.
Conceding that the measure “didn’t go anywhere last year,” Franks Legislative Aide Kim Linthicum told DIRECT Newsline that he reintroduced the measure because he “believe(s) it is simple common-sense protection for children sought by parents” and that “children need an extra layer of protection which this legislation will achieve.”
The Direct Marketing Association was not surprised by the bill’s reintroduction according to spokesman Chet Dalzell. He said “the benefits of information access by marketers to households with children are many and go far beyond marketing to include educational opportunities, the armed services, and the Center for Exploited children.”
Dalzell stressed that the DMA “supports the bill’s restrictions on the use of prison labor to process data [involving children] and its provision prohibiting anyone knowingly using a [marketing] list to harm a child.”
Besides those prohibitions, the bill (HR-369) would make it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison and fines of up to $5,000 per violation for anyone “in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, being a list broker [to] knowingly sell, purchase, or receive remuneration for providing personal information about a child, knowing that such information pertains to a child, without the written consent of a parent of that child.”
List companies, seeking written parental permission to distribute information about a child, would be required to disclose the source of the information, the information to be sold or rented, and the identity of the renter or buyer. Sales to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, accredited colleges, universities and other institutions of higher learning, the armed forces and law enforcement agencies would be exempt.
The measure would also require list companies to make their databases “available twice annually, without charge, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited children…in order to allow the Center to match it with the database of missing children” in its files
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