COPPA regulation makes it difficult for companies to cater to children under 13 without building in safeguards to collect and manage parental consent and to block third-party sharing of data without transparency. As a result most companies just prohibit users under 13 from signing up for their services, either as a policy or by having an age gate that prevents an under-13 child from signing up.
However, with a record number of under-13 users on the internet due to the pandemic, behavior is permanently shifting and many companies now want to cater to all audiences. By providing APIs to manage the collection of consent, we allow companies to safely acquire underage users while minimizing friction in the sign-up flow.
Our customer-facing REST API presents a few high-level resources that are needed for collecting parental consent and ID verification for children. Customers typically make 1 API call to create a profile for a child, and then 2–3 more calls to collect parental consent or verify age and ID if necessary. Afterwards, we push data to a webhook endpoint to notify the customer when consent has been collected or an ID has been verified.
Our business model is based on usage — we charge a small fee per user for whom we need to collect parental consent or verify age and ID.
We'd love to hear from you, especially if you have experience with products catering to children!