University of Alabama researcher: children's interactions with AI and addressable advertising raise new privacy and persuasion risks

Dr. Nancy Brennen, a University of Alabama professor with prior advertising-industry experience, told the Joint Interim Committees that children encounter a vastly larger set of data touchpoints today than when COPPA was enacted and that AI-driven personalization can influence behavior and opportunities across a child's life.

Brennen described explicit data (name, email, age) and implicit data (inferred interests, emotional state, learning differences) and said AI systems aggregate those signals across devices and services to create persistent profiles. She said her team's experiments show that messages that are personalized, interactive and conversational are far more persuasive to children than traditional broadcast ads.

"When you bring in personalization, interactivity and conversational messaging together, that has a much stronger impact on children," Dr. Brennen said, and she cited experiments using addressable TV and voice-assistant recommendations that increased children's expressed desire for advertised products compared with standard ads.

She recommended that state policy prioritize three pillars: stronger transparency mechanisms (short usable signals rather than long legalistic privacy policies), easy informed-choice mechanisms (clear opt-ins and opt-outs), and tools and education to empower parents to monitor and manage their children's data. She offered to provide the committee with citations and recent study materials.

Brennen emphasized caution about mandatory age-verification regimes that use "should-have-known" knowledge standards: such laws, she said, can force businesses to collect additional data to verify ages and may increase litigation risk compared with "actual knowledge" standards.

Committee members asked technical questions about programmatic ad ecosystems, data brokers and whether health data fall under HIPAA; Brennen explained that many programmatic placements rely on aggregated, deidentified profiles sold by brokers and that HIPAA generally does not cover consumer wearables unless data passes through covered medical providers.

No formal committee action was taken; members requested the cited studies and discussed next steps for potential pilot programs and curricular resources.