HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

FTC Targets Edmodo for Unlawful Use of Children’s Data and Delegating Compliance to Schools

May 22, 2023

Edmodo, an education technology provider, violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA Rule) by collecting and using children's personal data for advertising purposes without parental consent, according to the FTC. The company outsourced its compliance responsibilities to schools, thereby making them "solely" responsible for COPPA compliance without adequate disclosure. Edmodo is facing a proposed order prohibiting such practices, marking a precedent in the ed tech industry.
Alleged deployer
edmodo
Alleged developer
edmodo
Alleged harmed parties
children-whose-data-was-collected-and-used-for-advertising, schools-and-teachers-who-were-misinformed-and-burdened-with-coppa-compliance-responsibilities-without-adequate-disclosure

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/586

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.