Protection of Children's Privacy Rights in the Digital Era: Legal Challenges to Social Media Use
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This study analyses the legal framework for the protection of children's privacy rights in social media use, focusing on Indonesia's Law No. 27 of 2022 on Personal Data Protection (PDP Law) and Indonesia's obligations under UNCRC General Comment No. 25 of 2021. Employing a normative legal approach that integrates statutory, comparative, case-based, and conceptual methods, the study identifies five structural weaknesses in the PDP Law: inconsistent age definition for children (Article 6), absence of an explicit algorithmic profiling prohibition (Article 57), lack of operationalised age-verification standards, weak child data-erasure rights (Article 36), and institutional vacuum in supervisory authority (Article 58). A three-jurisdiction comparative analysis Indonesia, the European Union, and the United States places Indonesia in the weakest position across eight protection dimensions. Jurisprudential analysis of Irish DPC v. TikTok (€345 million, 2023) and FTC v. YouTube/Google (USD 170 million, 2019) empirically demonstrates a "two-tier privacy standard" applied by global platforms owing to Indonesia's weak enforcement environment. Curriculum analysis reveals that the Merdeka Curriculum has not integrated digital privacy rights within formal human rights education. This study introduces the "Digital Child Privacy Protection Pyramid" as a novel analytical framework integrating four complementary layers: strong regulation, independent oversight, platform accountability, and literacy-education-empowerment.
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