New York, NY - August 10, 2000 - The Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. is pleased to announce that ITurf Inc. has made major modifications to its network of Websites in order to bring them into compliance with CARU's Self-Regulatory Guidelines for Children's Advertising as well as the federally mandated Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

ITurf is a network provider of Websites targeted at a teenage and young adult audience, some of which also appeal to a tween population. CARU's review of: ITURF.COM, Thespark.com, ONTAP.COM, Sparknotes.com, DROOG.COM, and DELIAS.com in May 2000, found that these sites contained areas where visitors could enter personally identifiable information about themselves, and communicate directly with others, in chat rooms, message boards, newsletters and via email accounts administered by ITurf Inc. Both COPPA and CARU's Guidelines require verifiable parental consent when a site knowingly enables a child to post personally identifiable information as with an email account.

CARU's Guidelines extend to circumstances "Éwhere the Website knows the visitor is a child." In addition, the federally mandated COPPA states that where a Website's administrator has "actual knowledge" that it is collecting personal information from children, the law applies.

The sites administered by ITurf Inc. were found to have "actual knowledge" of a child audience because:

• the original privacy policy featured on many of ITurf's Websites acknowledged that, "[these] site[s] collect information from children without prior parental consent notification. [These] site[s] give children the ability to publicly post or distribute personally identifiable information without prior parental consent"
• registration for an email account (which required full name, street address) and "Tests" with subsequent email collection required visitors to enter their ages

CARU is happy that ITurf Inc. has made the following changes to bring its sites into compliance with the Guidelines and COPPA:

• ITurf revamped its privacy policy to responsibly address children.
• ITurf now screens visitors who identify themselves as under 13 years of age from chat rooms, from receiving email accounts, and from joining newsletters.
• ITurf has revised the "Test" features so as not to solicit or collect email addresses from users who are under 13 years of age.

CARU's inquiry was conducted under NAD/NARB/CARU Procedures for Voluntary Self-Regulation of National Advertising and resolved within 60 business days. Details of the inquiry, CARU's decision and the advertiser's response will be included in the next NAD Case Report.