Parental engagement is one of the biggest hurdles to developer compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), said speakers from the application developer industry, a safe harbor program and the FTC during a Thursday panel at the Family Online Safety Institute 2013 Conference. “We can’t legislate parenting,” said Dona Fraser, vice president of Entertainment Software Rating Board Privacy Certified, an FTC-approved safe harbor program for COPPA compliance. Many parents share account or credit card information with their children, said Mark Eichorn, FTC assistant director-Consumer Protection Bureau’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. That makes it hard to verify that an app has received parental consent to collect information on a user under the age of 13, he said. “Until that changes, we've got to recognize a lot of parents do this,” he said.

Stinson Morrison attorney Harvey Reiter will get just seven minutes to persuade Denver appeals court judges that the FCC’s 2011 revamp of the USF and intercarrier compensation rules unlawfully hurt his rural CLEC clients. Asked if that’s enough time, Reiter responded with a hearty laugh. “It is what it is,” he said. Scott McCollough of the Austin firm McCullough Henry has five minutes to convince the court that the FCC abandoned the statutory construct of “user” versus “carrier.” McCullough expects to “be interrupted within the first five seconds,” he told us, erupting into laughter.

A Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing on demand letters Thursday was its first foray into this year’s debate over the best legislative ways to curb patent abuse. Until now the House and Senate Judiciary committees have dominated that debate, with the Innovation Act (HR-3309), sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., being seen as the most advanced legislation dealing with the issue thus far. Industry observers anticipate Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., will bow a similarly important bill soon (CD Oct 28 p9).

The FCC continues to urge that the entire UHF band be “globally harmonized” to allow mobile broadband in addition to broadcast TV, Robert Nelson, chief engineer at the FCC International Bureau, said at the Americas Spectrum Management Conference Thursday. The proposal has been controversial, with broadcasters raising red flags.

TracFone Wireless worries Congress may kill the Lifeline program, a major source of TracFone success in recent years. The América Móvil subsidiary is the U.S.’s largest wireless Lifeline provider, with 3.6 million subscribers in 39 states. It has lobbied Congress and carried out a public information campaign for months now, its chief Washington lobbyist told us. Lifeline, funded by the FCC’s universal service fund and costing $2.2 billion in 2012, is intended to help low-income Americans with $9.25 per month in either wireless or wireline discounts and, in the case of wireless carriers, free cellphones. TracFone wants to head off any legislation that may end Lifeline and instead prompt its own further overhaul of the program, eyeing mid-2014 as ripe legislation time.

NARUC commissioners will discuss a resolution at their annual meeting this month that would require providers to disclose their actions that facilitate government surveillance. The resolution asks the FCC to order providers to protect consumers by telling them that they “should have no expectation of privacy” (http://bit.ly/1hNKrV8). Indiana Utility Regulatory Commissioner Larry Landis drafted the resolution demanding wireline, wireless and Internet Protocol networks disclose more of their government requests, due to the leaks over the past few months about National Security Agency surveillance, he told us Wednesday. “States have always been defenders of the individual, and I wrote this resolution in the model of individual protection,” said Landis.

European negotiators meeting in Wednesday with U.S. counterparts to discuss mass surveillance and data protection issues focused on a wide range of issues, some of which may take a long time to resolve or may remain unanswered, the European Commission told the European Parliament Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee at a hearing Thursday. The question of whether European citizens should have redress for breaches by the U.S. National Security Agency of their privacy rights is one that may have to be solved in steps, said Reinhard Priebe, director-internal security in the Home Affairs Directorate. The trans-Atlantic experts working group hopes to have a joint report ready by year’s end, said Fundamental Rights and Citizenship Director Paul Nemitz. The LIBE hearing focused on how best to ensure that unfettered spying never happens again

The controversial National Security Agency surveillance programs have created a “serious perception issue” for the U.S. as it tries to defend multistakeholder Internet governance on the international stage, State Department officials said during a news conference Wednesday. The NSA surveillance controversy was “the elephant in the room” last month at the International Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia (CD Oct 28 p9). IGF participants raised “lots of questions” about the surveillance programs, said Scott Busby, deputy assistant secretary of state-democracy, human rights and labor. Part of the U.S. mission at the conference was to listen to international input as the White House reviews those programs, he said.

The World Wide Web Consortium-backed Do Not Track talks moved toward the first deadline for closing out definitions -- “tracking” and “party” -- since creating a new timeline last week, according to interviews with participants and a public email forum. The new tracking preference expression-focused path forward has caused in-group tension, prompting the chairs to clarify their new strategy. But in the group’s weekly Wednesday call, dissention remained over the group’s new direction -- even over the decision to first close out a definition for “tracking,” which is supposed to be wrapped up by Nov. 20, said co-chairman Justin Brookman, director of Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy.

African-Americans are more likely than average to rely on the Internet for a job search, said the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in a study released Wednesday (http://bit.ly/HK9UR4). Fifty percent of African-American Internet users said the Internet was “very important” to them in successfully finding a job, compared with 36 percent of respondents overall. African-Americans also tended to find social networking sites to be more important to a job search than did most respondents.