EdLaw
Puerto Rico — Ley 185-2024 (privacidad cibernética de menores)
Puerto Rico's children's online-privacy statute, in force since 1 March 2025. It regulates "Páginas o Aplicaciones de Internet de Redes Sociales" — social-media sites and apps — that allow registration of users aged eighteen or under, layering on top of federal COPPA (which it expressly defers to for under-13s, Artículo 4).
Statute text is Spanish (the authentic language); this README is curation.
Applicability to EdTech
- Scope turns on the four-part social-media definition (Art. 2(d)): user-generated content shown to others, public/visible profiles, social interaction between users, and publishing content visible to other users. Email services and cloud-storage-only apps are expressly excluded. A learning platform is outside scope on this test unless it grows community features (student profiles visible to other users plus content sharing between them) — re-assess whenever collaboration features ship for Puerto Rico schools.
- If in scope, the duties are substantial: no publication/disclosure of a known minor's personal information without parental consent (Art. 4(a)); retention/sale limited to what is reasonably necessary for the service (Art. 4(b)); no profiling of known minors save necessity or a compelling best-interest purpose (Art. 4(c)); precise-geolocation limits (Art. 4(e)); privacy settings configurable at registration, not buried in defaults (Art. 4(f)); account and data deletion on request within 45 days (Art. 4(g)–(h)).
- "Menor de edad" is eighteen (18) years or less (Art. 2(g)) — broader than COPPA's under-13.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| PRIVACIDAD-CIBERNETICA.md | Artículos 1–8 in full (definitions, scope and duties, NET jurisdiction, penalties, vigencia) |
Enforcement
Negociado de Telecomunicaciones de Puerto Rico (NET) has exclusive and primary jurisdiction (Art. 5, Art. 7). Civil penalty of up to $25,000 per infraction — note the enacted text carries an errata, reading "veinticinco mil diez mil dólares ($25,0000.00)"; the press coverage and NET describe the cap as $25,000.
Licence
The reproduced text is Ley 185-2024, enacted by the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico, in its authentic Spanish, from the consolidated PDF of the Oficina de Gerencia y Presupuesto (OGP) Biblioteca Virtual. The Copyright Act applies in Puerto Rico, and with it the government edicts doctrine. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)
The OGP PDF carries no copyright notice (checked in full). Its closing note describes the compilation and claims nothing over it: "Nota. Este documento fue compilado por personal de la Oficina de Gerencia y Presupuesto del Gobierno de Puerto Rico, como un medio de alertar a los usuarios de nuestra Biblioteca de las últimas enmiendas aprobadas para esta Ley." The note says the italic bracketed annotations OGP adds "no forman parte de la Ley"; the corpus reproduces none of them.
No translation is reproduced. The text is Spanish as enacted; the English in the README is the corpus's own summary, not a translation by any other body. The LexJuris page in Sources is cited only: LexJuris de Puerto Rico, a private publisher, states "La información, las imágenes, gráficas u otro contenido en todos los documentos preparados por LexJuris son propiedad de LexJuris." and "Derechos Reservados. Copyright (c) 1996-al presente. LexJuris de Puerto Rico." (read 2026-10-01), and the corpus takes no text from it.
Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line on each section names the publisher, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that OGP or the Legislative Assembly endorses the corpus.
Related
- US COPPA — federal floor for under-13s, expressly preserved by Art. 4
- PR Ley 111-2005 — breach notification
- PR Ley 85-2018 (expedientes escolares) — school records