Danah boyd writes, "I'm really excited to share a new study that Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, John Palfrey and I have been working on for the last six months that has serious implications for parenting, education, free speech, and children's rights. While COPPA is meant to protect privacy and empower parents, it is usually implemented by general-purpose websites to simply block children from accessing the sites. Interestingly, many parents appear to respond by helping their children violate the age restrictions, thereby minimizing the protections that COPPA actually provides. Anyhow, as you probably know, COPPA is currently under review and there are pending laws that build on it. With that context in mind, we decided to investigate how effective COPPA is at actually empowering parents. The results of our study are now published."
Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social concerns, and technical issues, most general–purpose sites opt to restrict underage access through their ToS. Yet in spite of such restrictions, research suggests that millions of underage users circumvent this rule and sign up for accounts on Facebook. Given strong evidence of parental concern about children’s online activity, this raises questions of whether or not parents understand ToS restrictions for children, how they view children’s practices of circumventing age restrictions, and how they feel about children’s access being regulated. In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data. Our data have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.
Well timed, as I helped my 10 year old get around the age restriction for Pandora a couple days ago.
The Khan Academy provides usage data to teachers so they can monitor which lessons a student has viewed and which exercises the student has completed.
Under 13-year olds have to lie about their age to get a Google account to register for Khan Academy.
Until recently, I taught at a school where the oldest child was 13.
An informal survey showed that over 80% of the school had Facebook accounts, and every time I had to deal with issues arising from squabbles on FB, the parents knew about the account, but did not know their child’s passwords etc, and did not seem to know about FB’s age limit.
A large proportion of the children with their own laptops or smart phones had them to stop their FB use getting in the way of their parents’ FB use.
These laws are ridiculous. I recently had a baby. She’s two months old now. I wanted to set her up with a Facebook account so friends and relatives could see updates on how she’s doing, and people who aren’t that interested don’t have to watch a million baby updates on my account or her mother’s.
You also need an email account to sign up for facebook, so I got her a gmail account as well.
I had to lie and say she was over 13 on both of these sites. It’s stupid.
I’m not sure I see the big deal about Facebook, but then I’m a parent that regularly checks my daughter’s account, deletes things I find objectionable, determine who should be her “friend” and only restrict internet usage to a computer that is in the common area. It’s called parenting. The internet is the babysitter of the new generation, just like TV was for us, only now you can get extremely graphic content, when before, we were limited to mostly Hollywood violence and pseudo-sex, only making me slightly jealous that I had to get my jollies of watching scrambled porn channels, and now they get the real deal, which also mortifies me.
What people tend to forget about FB is that it exists solely to mine your data, so consequently, I put as little up as possible. No location, no work, no ancient history beyond school affiliations, same goes for my daughter, who may or may not be under 13.
My kids are all 13 or over now, but when this may or may not have happened, it was because they wanted to learn html and “do what Mommy does.” So I set them up with Blogger, which is an easy way to explore elementary web design. They learned a lot, and had fun.
shame on you. now, following your example, your children are probably smoking pot. and next year they’ll be shooting heroin. and to fund that habit, they’ll be selling themselves for cheap to longshoreman. the road to hell is paved with lawlessness of the sort you have modeled.
I’ve noticed that my friends who grew up with their parents buying them beer at 17, buy their kids beer, at 17.
It’s not rocket surgery. It’s culture.
This just in: blanket restrictions to “protect children”… don’t.
See also: inviting circumvention; illusion of parenting.
Oh, I thoiught you said circumcision and I was horribly confused there.
I didn’t realize adults were needed to check the “yes, i am over 13” box during registration.
I don’t understand why Evernote has this “restriction.”
If they don’t, they’re on the hook legally and it’s a complicated and potentially expensive process. Much easier to just block everyone under 13 than to take the trouble.
Neither of my children needed my help pretending they were 13 to sign up for anything on the Internet. It didn’t diminish my role as a parent, as I have the ability to see what they are doing on the computer at all times, since it’s in the same room as I am. I’m aware of what they do, but I don’t actively restrict them. If I notice something that concerns me, we’ll discuss it. COPPA covers asses, but not the ones it purports to.
Parents inore the COPPA laws the same way they ignore MPAA ratings and Parental Advisory Warnings on music. Its called being a parent. Parents who slavishly adhere to laws about what is approriate for indivivual kids then should just go ahead and hand their offspring over to the state to raise. I have four kids with four widely different sets of needs and abilities. My oldest is currently banned from FB while my 11 yo is in Farmville as I type this. Three of my kids adore horror movies,one is spooked by Nightmare Before Christmas. To each his own.
Laws like this make me rankle though because I have to explain to my kids at a very young age that some laws aren’t worth following. Although it is true some laws are inherently better than others I’d like to wait until critical thinking sets in before explaining it.