of the National Advertising Review Council [USA]
Please Note: Here are the general ethics guidelines by which Irwin Toy's Website will abide relative to internet use by children 13 years of age and under. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you may have regarding any of our policies.
Interactive Electronic Media
The guidelines contained in this section highlight issues unique to Internet and online advertising to children under 13. They are to be read within the broader context of the overall Guidelines, which apply to advertising in all media. For these purposes, the term "advertisers" also refers to any person who operates a commercial Website located on the Internet or an online service. Although all other sections of CARU's Self-Regulatory Guidelines for Children's Advertising address advertising directed to children under 12 years of age, in order to harmonize with the Federal Trade Commission's ("FTC") final rule implementing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 ("the Rule"), the guidelines contained in the section on Data Collection below apply to Websites directed to children under 13 years of age.
Just as these new media are rapidly evolving, so in all likelihood will this section of the Guidelines. Advances in technology, increased understanding of children's use of the medium, and the means by which these current guidelines are implemented will all contribute to the evolution of the "Interactive Electronic Media" section. CARU's aim is that the Guidelines will always support "notice", "choice" and "consent" as defined by the FTC, and reflect the latest developments in technology and its application to children's advertising.
Further, these children's Guidelines must be overlaid on the broader, and still developing industry standards, government statutory provisions and definitions for protecting and respecting privacy preferences. These industry standards include disclosure of what information is being collected and its intended uses, and the opportunity for the consumer to withhold consent for its collection for marketing purposes. Thus, in the case of Websites directed to children or children's portions of general audience sites that collect personal information from children, reasonable efforts, taking into consideration available technology, should be made to establish that notice is offered to, and choice exercised by a parent or guardian.
The availability of hyperlinks between sites can allow a child to move seamlessly from one to another. However there is no way to predict where the use of successive links on successive pages will lead. Therefore, operators of Websites for children or children's portions of general audience sites should not knowingly link to pages of other sites that do not comply with CARU's Guidelines.
In keeping with CARU's Principle regarding respecting and fostering the parents' role in providing guidance for their children, advertisers who communicate with children through email should remind and encourage parents to check and monitor their children's use of email and other online activities regularly.
To respect the privacy of parents, information collected and used for the sole purpose of obtaining verifiable parental consent or providing notice should not be maintained in retrievable form by the site if parental consent is not obtained after a reasonable time.
The following guidelines apply to online activities which are intentionally targeted to children under 13, or where the Website knows the visitor is a child. In Websites where there is a reasonable expectation that a significant number of children will be visiting, age-screening mechanisms should be employed to determine whether verifiable parental consent or notice and opt-out is necessitated per the Data Collection section of the Guidelines. These mechanisms should be used in conjunction with technology to help prevent an underage child from going back and changing his age to circumvent the age-screening. Care should be taken so that screening questions are asked in a neutral manner so as not to encourage children to provide inaccurate information to avoid obtaining parental permission. For purposes of this section, these activities include making a sale or collecting data, and do not include the use of "spokescharacters" or branded environments for informational or entertainment purposes, which are addressed in the "Endorsement" and "Disclosure" sections of the Guidelines.
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