So, Sony is paying $1 Million for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

It wasn’t any sort of evil white-collar schemy crime. They didn’t launder money or engage in insider trading. Like a surprising lot of companies, they just didn’t bother to bother the experts. In this case, children’s online community experts. They demonstrated a profound lack of rigor.

The thing wasn’t that they collected email addresses. There are ways to do that legally without jumping through too many hoops. And it wasn’t that they pshawed the COPPA Commandments. The mistake, at the simplest level, was asking for date of birth. That tiny little drop-down doohickey provided the “actual knowledge” that did them in.

There’s more to it, of course. And a company like Sony should be just as invested in best practices as they are in the law, and best practices for them would start with the acknowledgment that kids are going to be visiting their music websites and they’d better face that fact head on.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they went out shortly and recruited themselves a Czar to wear the thinking cap on this sort of thing from now on.

Tags: children's privacy, coppa coppr, online privacy, online safety, sony