Underage! Why children aren't supposed to be on Facebook and other SNS

Why do social networking sites ask if you are age 13 or older when you create an account? If you are a member of social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace, you notice that the magical age of 13 is required in order for you to make a username. You might also notice children who disregard this requirement and create an account anyway, so what is the point?

The simple answer is that the website is complying with a federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA was adopted in the U.S. in 2000 with the purpose of protecting the privacy and safety of children under 13 and to limit how websites market to them. (See the COPPA encyclopedia entry for details, and check out DOPA while you're there.)

Traditionally, children in the U.S. have been taught at a young age about stranger danger that stresses the importance of keeping your name, address and other personal information away from the eyes of people you don’t know. "Don’t talk to strangers" has been the parent’s mantra for decades, but it seems that the social networking scene is complicating this matter. If your child can’t talk to strangers, she can’t interact with other players on Club Penguin, so households have been making some exceptions to the stranger danger rules lately to accommodate fun Internet activities. Yet the fact remains that children are vulnerable. COPPA is one way the U.S. law has put safety measures in place.

Any website, such as Club Penguin, that markets to children online and collects their name and other details, must recognize it’s taking on an important responsibility, gain parental consent and, by law, put careful processes in place to ensure information about children is protected. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which are designed for an older audience, comply with COPPA by setting up an age requirement and trying to keep children out.

Children are kept safer when their name, phone number, and other details are kept private. Essentially, if an underage user disregards the age requirement of a social networking site, she is sneaking by boundaries that have been set up to protect her. Quite often, the sneaking isn’t really sneaking at all! Parents, family members and older friends alike, all consent to add the underage user to their friends list, without a thought to reporting the fraudulent account to the website administrator.

It could be said that COPPA is needless regulation. What is the worst that could happen when a child lies about her age or parental consent and signs up for an account anyway? Afterall, advertising and marketing can be seen by children in so many other places, and scary Internet predators could not possibly harm the majority of underage users. Sometimes, nothing life-altering happens to the underage user on Facebook. But it might be more accurate to say, no one notices what happens. It could be the child’s experiences on a social networking site for grown-ups will affect her in ways too difficult to measure or report.