As time shows, even if you have never been in the US, never done any business in the US, and done something that is not a crime in your country, you can still be extradited and put on trial there based on accusations made by large corporations and media companies. Imagine if Saudi Arabia tried to get you extradited because you broke one of their laws even if you've never been there - they would be told to go and fuck themselves. Yet when US makes such a request, most EU countries will jump like a schoolgirl and happily comply.

What's sad is that the only entity throwing any lobbying weight against COPPA is Facebook, and that plays in the media pretty much universally as a big evil corporation trying to get permission to prey on children. Not that that would stop it from happening in Congress, but the public support isn't there.

Frankly, I found this surprisingly misguided for something from the EFF. CFFA isn't the law that causes such absurd Terms of Service -- COPPA is.

Children have been misrepresenting their ages since well before COPPA was introduced, but I distinctly remember COPPA making the problem much worse amongst my peers.

I remember, a few weeks before one of my birthdays, having to pick between abandoning my Neopets account so that I could create a new one where I pretended to be over thirteen, or asking my parents to sign a printed permission slip for me and each of my sisters and let me fax it to Neopets.

I ended up doing the latter, but only because I knew we had a fax machine in the house, and my parents already knew (and were okay with) me being on Neopets all day long. A bunch of my peers just created new accounts, and eventually devolved into sock-puppeting once they realized that there wasn't necessarily a one-to-one correspondance between people and accounts.

I'm not sure what the right answer is, though. The moment that a child turns 16, 18, or 21 (depending on jurisdiction) they're inundated with peers who want to go on Facebook, offers for loyalty programs and credit cards from every store they visit IRL, and tracking cookies from Ad networks online. If a kid has $20, and wants to buy something from the local Wal-Mart, no one will stop him/her from doing so. But if a kid wants to spend that $20 on Amazon.com, COPPA prevents them from even creating an account in the first place.

As a kid, I felt like COPPA simply prevented me from participating in the world in a way that nobody would have ever experienced before dial-up became mainstream, and I seriously think that harmed my ability and that of my peers to handle the privacy concerns that plague barely-legal adults today.