Technology FAQ

Question 1

What does COPPA mean?

Accepted Answer

COPPA is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a 1998 federal law enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. It requires websites, apps and online services aimed at children under 13, or that knowingly collect data from them, to post a privacy notice and get verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information. In 2026 TikTok agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department COPPA suit.

Question 2

Does COPPA apply to 17 year olds?

Accepted Answer

No. COPPA protects only children under 13, so teens aged 13 to 17 are not covered by the federal law. Some states, including California, add privacy protections for minors, and Congress has considered a "COPPA 2.0" bill that would extend some protections to teens up to age 16. Until a change becomes law, the under-13 line remains the federal standard.

Question 3

Is COPPA a privacy law?

Accepted Answer

Yes. COPPA is a U.S. federal privacy law focused on children. It limits how companies collect, use and share personal information from kids under 13, requires a clear privacy policy, lets parents review and delete their child's data, and requires reasonable data security. The FTC and the Justice Department can seek civil penalties of tens of thousands of dollars per violation.

Question 4

Is there a ban on TikTok?

Accepted Answer

A 2024 federal law required ByteDance to sell TikTok's U.S. operations or face a nationwide ban, and the Supreme Court upheld it in January 2025. The ban never took full effect: enforcement was repeatedly delayed by executive order while a sale of TikTok's U.S. business to a group of investors was arranged. Many states separately bar TikTok on government devices.

Question 5

What states banned TikTok in the US?

Accepted Answer

No state bans TikTok for the general public. Montana passed the first statewide ban in 2023, but a federal judge blocked it before it took effect. Instead, more than 30 states, including Texas, Florida and Virginia, prohibit TikTok on government-issued phones and networks, citing data security concerns about its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Question 6

What is a public benefit corp?

Accepted Answer

A public benefit corporation is a for-profit company that writes a specific public benefit into its charter and requires its directors to balance that mission with shareholders' financial interests. Delaware, where many large U.S. companies incorporate, has allowed the structure since 2013. Anthropic, the San Francisco maker of the Claude AI models, is organized as a public benefit corporation.

Question 7

What are the largest public benefit corporations?

Accepted Answer

Among the best-known public benefit corporations are AI developers Anthropic and OpenAI, whose main for-profit business converted to a public benefit corporation in 2025. Publicly traded examples include eyewear retailer Warby Parker, insurer Lemonade and footwear brand Allbirds, and crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is another long-standing example. The structure lets companies pursue a stated mission alongside profit.

Question 8

Why is it called a large language model?

Accepted Answer

The name describes the system. A language model is a program that predicts the next word, or token, in a sequence of text. "Large" refers to scale: these models have billions or even trillions of parameters, the internal values adjusted during training, and they learn from enormous collections of text. OpenAI's GPT models, including GPT-6 Astra, are large language models.

Question 9

What is the difference between LLM and GPT?

Accepted Answer

LLM, or large language model, is the general category of AI systems trained on large amounts of text to understand and generate language. GPT, short for generative pre-trained transformer, is a specific family of LLMs built by OpenAI, and the term also describes the transformer design many other models share. ChatGPT is the chatbot app that runs on OpenAI's GPT models.

Question 10

What US states have AI laws?

Accepted Answer

There is no comprehensive federal AI law, so states have acted on their own. Colorado passed the first broad law on high-risk AI systems in 2024, California enacted transparency rules for developers of large frontier models in 2025, and Texas and Utah have passed laws covering government AI use and disclosures. Many states also restrict AI-generated election deepfakes and explicit images.