Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule | Hacker News Reader

Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule

zephoria.org

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."

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

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

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."

I concur. My (younger-than-13) children have Gmail accounts (which they don't have the passwords for), partly for use with Khan Academy. With the OS X parental filters, my kids know that mom gets a copy of every email sent to them.

When they're 13, we'll relax those restrictions.

As for Facebook? Not happening until they have a better grasp of the consequences of publicly sharing information ... which may not occur until well after 13.

The Internet doesn't forget. I'd like to not allow my kids to learn that the hard way too early in their lives.

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.

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.

I created a gmail account to sign my son up for Khan Academy at age 5. He doesn't really know what email is; though he first 'wrote' his name in an email when he was 2 IIRC.

It never crossed my mind to check the age restrictions on gmail. KA appears to be pretty safe so I jumped the hoop for him.

No rule is safe to ignore - even when they're unjust you usually need to subvert them quietly. But every rule should be examined.

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.

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 :-)

Guilty as charged.

Why?

If she was ready before then, why would you keep her off, and if she wasn't ready, why would you interpret that law as requiring you to let her have an account?

All you'll train into her will be a desire to do anything forbidden. Watch out for drinking unless you introduce it in moderation.

The Facebook terms of service say that you need to be 13, so I stuck to that.

I don't think this is encouraging anyone to desire forbidden things; she desired Facebook because she thought it would be fun, and had to wait because those were the rules.

On the contrary, I don't think it's a good idea to teach 13-year-olds that the rules don't apply to them just because they want something.

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

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.

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.

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

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)?

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.

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?

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.

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