Uphold Children’s Data Privacy With Our COPPA Compliance Checklist

If you are on the verge of launching a new app or service that involves the collection of children’s data, you might have missed one essential consideration: securing your COPPA compliance. If so, we recommend you immediately stop collecting and sharing children's data. Service providers not following the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) rules will face major monetary and legal repercussions.

We are here to give you peace of mind by ensuring your app or website complies with child-related safety protocols. We will show you how to edit your data collection policy and behaviors and ensure you have a channel for parental consent.

To avoid facing potential legal repercussions from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC),  please use our COPPA compliance checklist below, which will explain in detail how your product can comply with the rules and protect children’s right to privacy.

What is COPPA Compliance?

In 1998, the United States Congress passed COPPA, a federal law mandating how websites and apps can gather, implement, and share sensitive data from children under 13. Such resources will also need parental consent to collect data from children.

Here are the most important factors to consider:

1. Children’s Privacy: COPPA’s first and most vital objective is to secure children’s online privacy and inform parents how their children’s data is gathered and used.
2. Attaining Consent: A parent must provide confirmed consent before any information can be collected from their child. This is generally attained via form signing or email confirmation.
3. FTC Protection: Please keep in mind that COPPA is enforced by the FTC, which will penalize service providers for failing to comply.

How to Know If You Need to Comply With COPPA

Simply put, if your website or app gathers data from children below the age of 13, you will be subject to COPPA. This condition has more nuance, so let us break it down.

You will be subject to COPPA if:

1. Children are part of your target audience, or your service may be used by children under 13.
2. Any third parties you are associated with may collect data from children under 13.
3. You target an adult demographic, but your services may encounter children under 13 as customers.
4. Any advertising or marketing resources or plug-ins you run in your service may target children under 13.

What Counts as Personal Information?

Companies often fail to understand what constitutes personal information and are unwittingly penalized for it. We want you to fully appreciate which details you might gather that count as personal information.

Below is a list of every detail the FTC counts as personal information:

• Names, both first and last.
• Physical addresses, including home location and street and city or town names.
• Usernames and unique identifiers that children may use when signing up for your or other services.
• Telephone or mobile device numbers
• Social Security numbers
• Photographs and audio or video files containing a child’s visual appearance or voice.
• Geolocation data that would allow one to locate a child’s location or that which directly provides a child’s physical location, like their residence, town, or city.
• Information used in combination with the above related to a child or their parents.

COPPA Compliance Checklist

Do not worry if you are still unsure how to comply with COPPA. We have created a checklist based on the FTA’s official guidelines to help you quickly and easily revise your service policy and operations.

This checklist will ensure that your services protect children and provide complete transparency and agency for their parents.

How to Be Fully Compliant Beyond COPPA

Data might be the foundation of your business’s success, but how accurate is the information you gather? Are you confident you have complete data ownership and control?

Your Complete Security, Privacy, and Access Solution

Countly is a first-party digital analytics platform designed to help you enhance security, privacy, and data control in your website or app. While compliance with regulations like COPPA, HIPAA, GDPR, and PDPL requires broader internal practices, Countly provides powerful tools to support your efforts—giving you greater visibility, control, and protection over your user data.

Find out how we ensure your compliance, security, and transparency while respecting your users’ privacy:

• Full control with self-hosting: Get started with on-premise data control, free of third-party access.
• End-to-end secure transmission: Encrypt your user data in transit and prohibit unauthorized access and tampering.
• Enable ‘right to be forgotten’: Ensure total data deletion whenever required by COPPA or GDPR compliance.
• ‘Do not track’ compliance: Let users control their tracking, keeping you legally transparent.
• Data-at-rest encryption: Secure collected data from illegal internal and external access.
• Complete system audit logs: Track more than 30 system activities for compliance and security audit needs.
• Powerful login security: Enable strong passwords, HTTPS logins, and defend against brute-force attacks.
• Role-based access control (RBAC): Regulate data access, ensuring only authorized users can get in.
• No IP address storage: Convert IPs to general location information and remove them for the sake of privacy.
• Total data portability: Enable accessible data export and transfer to additional services.

At Countly, we empower customer data capture and analysis, ensuring your insights are actionable and confidential. We emphasize data sovereignty and security in our services independent of third-party tracking.

We will help you securely collect, investigate, and act on your customer data. We also want to simplify your digital analytics, so you will only need to use our services rather than several, as is the traditional way.

“Many traditional tools put the onus on the customer to build compliance on top of the product. With Countly, we’ve done that heavy lifting. All these differences, all-in-one capability, first-party deployment, customizability, and privacy-centric design, make Countly a very unique player in the analytics space.” - Onur Alp Soner, CEO at Countly

What Kind of Services Can You Offer Once You Are COPPA Compliant?

Once you secure your COPPA compliance, you can work on your primary goals, like delivering a trustworthy and secure user experience. Countly supports your compliance efforts while providing deep insights into user interactions.

We are with you every step of the way in your efforts to foolproof your platform’s safety, transparency, and effectiveness.

Let us explore one example of how

E-learning

Whether you run a web, desktop, or mobile e-learning app, it's crucial to ensure compliance while improving user engagement.

Countly helps you collect, analyze, and act on user data to refine your platform, enhance learning experiences, and maintain regulatory compliance.

Below, we detail how you can optimize your e-learning platform by tracking user behavior, gathering feedback, and enhancing engagement with A/B testing and smart notifications.

1. User Behavior Tracking

Knowing how effective your platform is at driving quality education is essential. Establish how well children and their parents understand and complete your various lessons and activities. You can refine your e-learning app further with our A/B and UI/UX testing.  

You can also create funnels that monitor and analyze your most essential customers' vital steps when signing up for your app and where they may drop off in the user journey.

2. Collecting Feedback as Needed

Surveys and feedback forms give you clear insight into your product’s strengths and growth areas as provided by your key customers.

Your students are your greatest advisors, especially when they request improvements to your courses and general services. Once you have followed their recommendations, let your students (and their parents) know and boost your Capterra, G2, and Trustpilot reviews.

“When you work with first-party analytics, you deal with your users’ trust. Their data is valuable, and your top priority as a company should be to protect it,” - Onur Alp Soner, CEO at Countly.

3. Shape Your Student’s Education

You might have a fantastic course for every essential subject a student could need, but if they are not adequately notified of them, said materials may go to waste.

Ensure your notification system sends your students on the correct journey to maximize their learning experience. You can upsell other courses to students if you establish your user journey correctly.

"Countly has proven to be an ideal analytics solution for our research, which usually centers around how people interact with technology. Countly has been uniquely able to check all the boxes for us, allowing us to focus on developing research apps rather than analytics solutions." Jeremy Johnson - Senior Research Scientist, Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Institute of Technology

COPPA Compliance FAQ

Still worried that you have not checked every box? We have created a list of frequently asked questions to help answer any additional questions you may have.

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