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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

What "Children protection" means really is "we want to shelve children in a dark dry place until they reach age".

The problem with that kind of thinking is that it will yield toddlers of age. Able-bodied but socially infantile.

The solution to that problem is that those rules are largely ignored by everyone. But this creates the dangerous law relativity where you have these laws but know they're never applied to you. And when they suddently are applied you are in a deep trouble.

Stupid people -> Stupid laws -> Stupid society.

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You know that the "PP" in COPPA stands for "privacy protection," right? It's not "child protection."

So you assume it protects privacy from children?

No, I assume it's intended to protect the privacy of children.

Seriously, go read it (http://www.coppa.org/coppa.htm). You're getting your jimmies rustled under the pretense that COPPA has anything to do with protecting children from the "evils" of the Internet.

So you don't see how protecton of privacy of children is a subset of protection of children?

When you define it as such, yes.

But here's the distinction: the "protection of privacy" is not a subset of the "protection of children."

You're throwing COPPA into the same bucket as every other misguided attempt to shelter children from the boogeymen of the Internet. That's not its intent; you're misinterpreting it.

I judge it on the merit exclusively; that's what you should do with any laws.

By its results. And the results are not pretty: we are now growing a generation of liars who learned to lie by default, as a pre-requisite to everything.

Yikes. Making it legal to prey on children online is not a great solution.

Making things you can't control illegal is not a solution at all.

Think of the children!

This is old and tired, especially when you throw in emotionally charged phrases like "prey on". Does Facebook prey on its users? Around a billion people don't think so.

Facebook does not allow pre-teens on their site precisely because of this law. I do not think that's a bad thing. The law is not perfect, but it is intended to be a tool to stop people from exploiting kids 12 and under. The exploitation isn't necessarily from the site operator, but other users. If Facebook had a bunch of 11 year olds (and now with Graph Search it would be easy to find 11 year olds near you) the main concern would not be that Facebook would somehow take advantage, but that other people on Facebook would.

These same kids cannot go to a PG-13 rated movie without an adult either, I don't find this especially onerous.

http://www.facebook.com/help/441374602560317/

With all due respect, that's between a parent and their child. At the very least, the name COPPA is disingenuous and misleading - I'm pretty sure if it was called the Ban Kids From Facebook law, it would not have the same level of public support.

Also, the MPAA rating system is not a legal requirement. AFAIK, there is no law which prevents 13 year olds from watching PG-13 movies, either in theaters or at home: http://www.theclyde.net/TheClyde_Ratings.htm

(The REAL problem, of course, is the suffering of children being shelved, but who really cares what children feel? Not many.)

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