The kids’ web market is in for a big jolt come next month.
    On April 21 a new federal law goes into effect that makes it a criminal act for web sites to collect personal information from children under the age of 13 without explicit parental consent.
     Sites will be breaking the law whether or not they are knowingly collecting the information; for instance, sites that allow children access to chat rooms are at risk because once there youngsters are able to divulge personal information.
  This includes web sites that offer email services for children.
    Advertisers that track information from children visiting web sites are also at risk.
    This is going to be a setback for marketers who have for the last few years been exploiting how easy it is on the web to gather information from children. It has been common practice for kids web sites to request personal information from children as a prerequisite for playing interactive games.
     "I’d say at least 100,000 sites or more are affected, and this includes some of the most popular sites on the net," says Parry Aftab, an internet lawyer who specializes in children’s issues and author of "The Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children in Cyberspace."
    Not many of these thousands of sites are remotely ready for the law, she says.
     According to the new law, which is called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), parents must give their consent to web sites either through postal mail or fax, a toll-free phone , a credit-card number or e-mail that employs an advanced technology known as a digital signature.
    "You’re going to see a big fallout and a huge change in how things are done," says Aftab.
    "In the short term, most of the children’s web industry is going to have serious trouble."
     At this point no one can be quite sure the exact effect the new law will have on advertising on children’s sites but Aftab expects a fair amount of chaos.
    It certainly won't do them any good, and it could end up causing them heaps of trouble.
    The law appears to  incriminate advertisers who might have information sharing arrangements with web sites where their ads run, should the web site be found to be in violation of the new law.
    "Advertisers are going to have to change their tune," says Aftab. "If a web site is sharing information with an advertisers and if the advertiser is laying a cookie on top of it, they’re in big trouble."
    COPPA was passed in October 1998 and adopted last October.
    The law arose in response to an Federal Trade Commission survey of children’s web sites in 1998 that determined that 89 percent of children’s sites were collecting personal details from kids, while only 23 percent of these sites were bothering to ask children to get permission to allow them to do it.
    "This law was only put into place because certain sites were being pigs," says Aftab. "They were collecting too much information and doing whatever they wanted with it. The kids were like marketing experiment of the year."
   While most kids sites seem unaware of the new law, there are a few that say they've prepared for it.
   "We’ve been pretty much ready for this for a while," says Peter Kay, director of new media for Sports Illustrated for Kids, which runs a popular web site in conjunction with the print magazine.
   Kay says the web site has never registered kids with personal information, nor has it asked for anything but first names and hometowns when kids participate in surveys or other interactive features.
    About a year and a half ago, Kay says, Sikids.com experimented with an electronic version of "free trial issue" postcard that kids could fill out and send in. But when COPPA started looming on the horizon, he says, they simply stopped.
    In more recent weeks there have been more dramatic stoppages.
    In January, NBCi quietly and unilaterally terminated all email accounts registered to children under 13 on its free email service Email.com, which is operated jointly by Snap.com and the email service company Mail.com.
    NBCi explains it had no practical way to gather parental permission and so the only way it could obey the law was to discontinue offering email to children.
    Attorney Aftab says this will become a common first response.
    "I think a lot of companies will just say ‘No kids.’" This can work if the site doesn’t depend upon children for its existence.
    Among sites that actively seek kid visitors, Aftab anticipates creative solutions in the long haul. For instance, one way to get around the problem with chat rooms is to institute time-delay chat, monitored by the hosting web site to be sure no child is putting personal information out there.
    She also anticipates more web sites offering online environments that parents can sign up for, and in do doing giving the required permission for their children up front.
    But she expects most sites to be caught off guard.
    "A lot of them think they’re in compliance but they don’t really understand how it works," says Aftab.

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.