Recently, Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ed Markey (D-MA) proposed amendments to COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) that could have far-reaching consequences for the EdTech ecosystem. If enacted as written, these changes would affect publishers, schools, and any educational organizations that use online tools—potentially disrupting digital instruction and the delivery of personalized learning.
The full text of the bill is available from public sources.
The Alarming Problem
The intent behind the senators’ proposal is to curb exploitative practices by major technology companies that leverage algorithms to profile and market to minors. That is a worthwhile goal. However, the current language of the amendments is broad enough that it could unintentionally prohibit many legitimate and beneficial educational uses of technology.
Schools and educational platforms routinely profile learners as part of instruction: they assess, sort, and recommend content to support each student’s learning path. Personalized learning systems use algorithms to recommend lessons, resources, and teacher interventions based on student performance and needs. Under the proposed language, a great deal of this activity could qualify as “targeted marketing” and therefore be prohibited unless verifiable consent is obtained from each minor for every operator involved.
Consider the practical implications. A typical school year involves dozens of digital tools—learning management systems, assessment platforms, eTextbook portals, adaptive tutors, publisher sites, and other apps. Requiring verifiable consent from students (and often parents) for each separate operator would create an enormous administrative burden. It appears the bill’s wording treats consent on an operator-by-operator basis rather than permitting a single, blanket consent for the school’s suite of tools. Collecting and managing hundreds or thousands of individual consents per school would be impractical and would likely result in many parents declining, leaving students without many important digital supports.
The likely outcome of widespread refusal to consent would be fractured instruction: some students could access digital tools while others could not, creating equity problems and undermining the promise of personalized learning. For educators and publishers, that fragmentation could stifle innovation and reduce the benefits that data-informed instruction can provide.
Worrisome Sections
The provisions of greatest concern include a broad prohibition against an operator using, disclosing, or compiling personal information of a minor “for purposes of targeted marketing,” except where the operator has obtained verifiable consent. The bill also defines “targeted marketing” to mean “advertising or any other effort to market a product or service that is directed to a specific individual or device” based on personal information, profiling, or device identifiers, and tied to the individual’s use of websites, services, apps, mobile applications, or operating systems.
These definitions are sweeping. If “targeted marketing” includes any message or recommendation directed to a specific minor—without a clear commercial requirement—then routine educational communications such as “Hello sixth-grade students, click here for your reading assignment” could be interpreted as prohibited marketing. That interpretation would sweep in communications from schools, publishers, and legitimate educational services that aim to support learning rather than sell commercial products.
There are constructive, low-impact uses of profiling that benefit learners. For example, anonymized, aggregated profiles can help colleges recruit prospective students who have expressed academic interests; publishers can promote remedial math tools to groups of anonymized users who are struggling; and teachers can discover resources that match learners’ needs. Those uses reduce recruitment and discovery costs and can improve outcomes when implemented with appropriate privacy protections.
Saving Personalized Learning
To preserve the benefits of personalized learning while protecting children’s privacy, several targeted modifications should be considered for any COPPA amendments:
- Allow anonymized or de-identified profiling for educational purposes. Systems should be permitted to compile and use anonymized user attributes for targeted delivery of learning materials and recommendations, provided identities are not exposed. Anonymized targeting would let marketplaces and publishers surface appropriate resources to learners without revealing personal identities to advertisers or third parties.
- Permit contextual, internal targeting within learning platforms. Knowledge marketplaces and learning systems should be able to bias search and recommendation results to prioritize age- and level-appropriate resources (including regionally aligned materials) so students find content that matches their learning stage. Users should be able to override or refine those recommendations as needed.
- Allow “reverse advertising” or group-based controls. Schools and learning groups should be able to configure what appears to their members—filtering or prioritizing approved resources and minimizing outside distractions. This function serves as a form of parental or institutional control and supports coherent curricula without exposing individual child data to third-party marketers.
- Provide controlled archival and deletion options. Minors should be able to archive their profiles temporarily before a permanent deletion is executed, with a cooling-off period and recovery options. This protects learners from impulsive full-deletes while preserving the right to be forgotten once the archive period elapses.
- Do not exempt non-profits wholesale. Non-profit educational entities should not be categorically excluded from privacy rules merely by status. Past incidents have shown that non-profit organizations can be involved in large-scale data projects that raise privacy concerns; consistent rules across organizational types help protect students and maintain fairness in the market.
Well-crafted amendments can address legitimate concerns about commercial exploitation of children’s data while preserving safe, privacy-respecting uses of profiling that enable personalized learning. Policymakers should refine the language to distinguish harmful targeted advertising from educational personalization and administrative communications, and to build in robust safeguards for anonymization, parental controls, and data governance.
Call to action: If you work in education, publishing, or EdTech, consider contacting your federal legislators to urge careful revision of proposed COPPA amendments so they protect children without unintentionally dismantling effective digital learning practices.
This op-ed was submitted by The Learning Counsel, a research institute and media organization focused on the shift to digital curriculum and school transformation.