

Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule  - sathishmanohar
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/11/01/parents-survey-coppa.html

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grannyg00se
This is a blog post summing up a research paper. The paper concludes:

"Instead of providing more tools to help parents and their children make
informed choices, industry responses to COPPA have neglected parental
preferences and have altogether restricted what is available for children to
access. As a result, many parents now knowingly allow or assist their children
in circumventing age restrictions on general–purpose sites through lying. By
creating this environment, COPPA inadvertently hampers the very population it
seeks to assist and forces parents and children to forgo COPPA’s protection
and take greater risks in order to get access to the educational and
communication sites they want to be part of their online experiences."

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delinka
It's always been about reducing corporate liability in the name of Protecting
the Children rather than actually protecting the children. No surprises here.

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brador
More like the vocal few setting the rules for the silent majority.

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davidjhall
As father of a 12 year old, the parent has to be a gauge of their maturity
level -- I think she's too young for facebook and can wait a year (maybe
longer.)

I do have issue with email --- she's more than old enough to write/receive
email and there's a 13 year old restriction on Gmail (and, subsequently,
Khan's Academy!) I think that's ridiculous and had to have the talk about
"what rules are safe to ignore."

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sp332
_she's more than old enough to write/receive email_

Really? I'm a 25-year-old guy and some of the spam I get curls my toes.

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kellishaver
I recently set up an email account for my daughter, who is 9, so she could use
it to email friends and family (we have family that lives several thousand
miles away).

When she wants to check it, the rule is we check it first. She doesn't even
know the password at the moment. I don't read her private emails from her
friends - I think even a 9yr old deserves some privacy and she's a responsible
kid, but I do go through and delete spam (which she only gets very rarely
since she's not allowed to sign up for things without permission and can only
give it to friends at school). That way I can also make sure she's not getting
email from MrCreepy47 or something.

The main thing, though, is that when we go through it, we talk about it. "This
is spam. They're probably just trying to sell you junk and a lot of it isn't
appropriate for kids. If you get email from someone you don't know, right now
you should just delete it and not even look at it. If something doesn't seem
right, tell us so we can look into it."

The Internet is a big place that can be dangerous for kids and I think they
need some measure of protection, but I also think they need controlled
exposure to it so they can be taught how to deal with it - even, and perhaps
especially, the bad stuff.

Her email is (her nickname)@(her name.com) which she thinks is awesome, so I'm
hopeful that by setting it up early and keeping an open dialog about its
usage,it will prevent the sneaking around to do things behind our back in the
teen years - or at least keep her safer when she does.

She's a great kid and generally very responsible, but I'm under no delusions
that she's perfect or that she won't make a bad judgement call at some point.
I'm just trying to give her the tools and skills to minimize that.

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michael_dorfman
My eldest daughter spent the night before her 13th birthday in front of the
computer, with the Facebook registration information filled out, waiting with
her finger poised above the Enter key for the stroke of midnight.

Yeah, I'm a hard-ass.

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thirdhaf
You let your thirteen-year old stay up until midnight for a Facebook
registration? That sounds less like a hard-ass and more like an eccentric :-)

~~~
michael_dorfman
Guilty as charged.

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dennisgorelik
It's a good illustration of unintended consequences of "safety laws". Children
suffer the most from COPPA.

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fragsworth
At some point in their lives kids have to learn that certain rules are safe to
ignore. I see no significant problems here. Worst case some kids get their
accounts disabled.

~~~
nimblegorilla
The saddest part of that article were the first 3 comments. Three parent being
proud of the "teachable moment" where they taught their 12 year olds to follow
the terms of service and not get accounts until turning 13. I'm not a parent,
but I think it's more important that kids are taught how to protect their
online privacy rather than acting like sheep and letting them loose at an
arbitrary age.

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Newgy
This article completely ignores one of the central reasons for COPPA-- to
protect children from personally targeted corporate marketing/ad sales.

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alttag
... and also from the consequences of early stupid decisions. We're entering
an era when all of our actions will be stored on the Internet. Give kids some
time to screw things up in a more risk-free way before setting them loose in a
world of cloud servers that record everything.

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Me1000
The flaws of the law are more basic than anything mentioned. How exactly do
people expect companies to enforce it? The most you can do is add a couple
fields for the user to entire their birthday. The article states 'These
findings prompted outrage back in May as politicians blamed Facebook for
failing to curb underage usage.' … brilliant. The implication is that Facebook
is required to collect data on < 13 year old children in order to determine
their real age, only to realize that they've already violated the law.

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brc
Some of my friends have setup facebook pages for their < 5 year old kids and
regularly post pics and comments to their kids profile pages. I'm not sure why
they have done this, it's not like you need to reserve their name or anything.
It's all a bit creepy if you ask me.

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Cadsby
In the same way that people tend to overestimate their own abilities (e.g.
everyone thinks they're a great driver and it's everyone else that's a hazard
on the road), I think most parents vastly overestimate their children's
maturity and decision making capabilities.

I'm not sure why parents are so keen to run out and let their kid's create
their own Facebook account either. Everyone in my child's life is within
proximity to his physical space, i.e., family and friends at school, etc. When
he wants to say hi to grandma we jump on skype or video via gchat.

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absconditus
Why do you all seem to want your children to use Facebook so badly?

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fleitz
Why not just put in place decent privacy laws for _everyone_?

Something like PIPEDA would be a huge step forward for privacy in the US.

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dennisgorelik
Why not just dump all such laws that restrict freedom of expression and
refocus government on what it is designed for: providing infrastructure for
the society (building roads, fraud prevention etc.)?

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MostAwesomeDude
COPPA isn't designed to forbid freedom of expression; it was intended to
protect children from advertisers and data miners. Google not being allowed to
register accounts for kids without a big wall of legal documents from their
parents is _exactly_ what this was intended to do.

This is a rare case of the system working.

~~~
dennisgorelik
When kids have problems creating Google/Facebook accounts - that restricts
kids' freedom of expression.

Regarding "protecting from advertisers" - do you want government to protect
you from advertisers?

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MostAwesomeDude
Every other week there's a new explosion of stories about Google or Facebook
or some other advertiser invading user privacy in some new and interestingly
not-illegal way. People have been clamoring for rules which force advertisers
and other data gatherers to not be so evil. COPPA is one such rule.

I don't really care, personally, but this is about more than just me.

