Sites Drop Kids to Comply With COPPA
Its Easier and Safer to Drop Kids Access than to Comply with Law
Although Children can Easily Circumvent the Law
April 26, 2000
Compliance with the new Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), intended to protect kids' privacy, is rolling out across the Web, limiting access to services that users of all ages had probably taken for granted. Already America Online has deleted the online profiles of anyone who is self-identified as being under the age of 13.
Under COPPA, commercial sites that collect personal information from kids under 13 will be violating federal law if they don't first get written parental consent. Of course, a bright 10 year old can simply lie about his age.
Would you like to have your popular teen web site comply with the new law? The federal government has thoughtfully provided a new website, aptly named How to Comply With The Child's Online Privacy Protection Rule
Facing the possibility of federal fines of as much as $10,000 per offense, popular youth sites such as Alloy and Snowball.com have banned pre teens from chat rooms and services like free e-mail.
Most teen and child oriented sites had collected minimal information, primarily using it for e-mail advertising. Abuse was virtually nonexistent. But politicians and the Federal Government, always in search of a problem to solve, decided this intrusion was an unacceptable violation of children's privacy.
The SOLUTION? To require substantially more intrusive information from the child's parent or guardian, including, but not limited to, credit card numbers, parents names, addresses and more. And the information, called in government speak a Verifiable Parental Consent (VPC), must be supplied in the form of a faxed or mailed letter (not Internet consent). the WIZARD bets that thousands of parents will actually teach their children to lie about their ages, rather than comply with this onerous act.
And given the expense of tracking these manually prepared, faxed and mailed, VPC's, many web sites are betting that banning the under 13 set makes the more sense than complying with the law. And since kids will quickly learn to lie about their ages (and often names or other required information), the web sites have little to lose.
The greater concern is that this is a first step toward censorship or the outright banning of web sites or web site access. Since this law won't work, look for politicians and child protection advocates to cry out for more stringent actions.
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