Kids Off Lists Bill Is Back in Play

LEGISLATION HAS BEEN reintroduced by Rep. Robert Franks (R-NJ) that would prohibit list companies from distributing personal information about children without parental consent.

It’s the third time Franks has proposed the Children’s Privacy Protection and Parental Empowerment Act. It died in committee last year with the expiration of the 105th Congress and in 1996 when the 104th Congress passed into history.

Conceding that the measure “didn’t go anywhere last year,” legislative aide Kim Linthicum says Franks presented it again because he believes “it is simple common-sense protection for children sought by parents.”

The bill (HR-369) would make it a federal crime, punishable by up to five years in prison and fines of as much as $5,000 per violation, for anyone “in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, being a list broker [to] knowingly sell, purchase or receive remuneration for providing personal information about a child, knowing that such information pertains to a child, without the written consent of a parent of that child.”

List companies seeking written parental permission to distribute information about a child would be required to disclose the source of the information, the information to be sold or rented and the identity of the renter or buyer. Sales to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, accredited colleges and universities, the armed forces and law enforcement agencies would be exempt.

The measure would also require list companies to make their databases “available twice annually, without charge, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited children…in order to allow the center to match it with the database of missing children” in its files.

The Direct Marketing Association, though not surprised by the bill’s reappearance, is unhappy about it. “We continue to be opposed to that bill as we have [been] in the last two Congresses,” says DMA vice president for congressional relations Richard Barton. “It goes much too far as to how it treats direct marketing lists.”

Barton adds, however, that the DMA is in favor of “provisions saying that prison labor cannot be used to process any list information about children, and we agree with the provision prohibiting anyone from knowingly using a marketing list to harm a child.”

DMA spokesman Chet Dalzell comments that “the benefits of information access by marketers to households with children are many and go far beyond marketing to include educational opportunities, the armed services and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”