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 VirtualKid/GovTeen, operator of a Website containing various chat rooms, bulletin boards and other online forums, has agreed to modify its Website in order to protect the privacy of children.

When CARU first examined the site in March 2000, VirtualKid without obtaining prior parental consent, allowed children under13 years of age to enter personal information (such as email address, full name, postal address, phone number), and communicate directly with people of any age. For example, children could register to post personal information on a VirtualKid bulletin board by merely submitting their email address to VirtualKid. VirtualKid did not inform parents that their children could divulge personal information, nor did it require verifiable parental consent. In addition, VitualKid required no age screening, registration or parental notification or consent prior to permitting children to enter its chat rooms that were not appropriate for children, and where children could divulge personal information that would allow anyone (of any age) to contact them off-line, presenting a safety risk. In addition, children in these chat rooms could be "whispered" into private chats that are completely unmonitored. All of these practices were in violation of CARU's Self-Regulatory Guidelines for Children's Advertising and the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Although VirtualKid, which has recently changed its name to GovTeen, did not initially respond to CARU's request for information, it has now voluntarily agreed to make the following changes to bring its Website into compliance with CARU's Guidelines and COPPA:

1. Install new login screens for GovTeen chat rooms and message (bulletin) boards, which will ask for age without giving any hints as to its purpose;
2. Install a mechanism that will prohibit children under 13 years of age from using bulletin boards, chat rooms or any other activities that permit the disclosure of personal information and prevent the collection of information from such individuals, unless and until prior verifiable parental consent, as defined in the CARU Guidelines and COPPA, has been received by the operator;
3. Modify the GovTeen privacy policy to indicate that no one under 13 years of age is allowed to use GovTeenÕs chat rooms or bulletin boards;
4. Use "session" cookies or similar mechanisms to prevent visitors who were prevented from registering because of age from attempting to immediately reregister by changing their age;
5. Remove any mention of the requirement of being 13 years of age from the registration or login screens, thereby removing an incentive for a child to lie about his/her age.
6. The operator stated that it would not offer any chat capabilities until it could make the above changes, which it expected to be completed by the end of September 2000.

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.