As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children.
I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they are completely dependent on their parents for food, shelter, and transportation. Just because they’re online, I don’t abdicate my responsibility as their guardian, but companies think it’s a good idea to allow kids to bypass the restrictions that were in place because they’ve reached an age that was meant as a minimal age for tracking in a very young Internet.
Unfortunately for our kids, we’ve become extremely restrictive to the service they have access to, they can only use platforms that allow communicating with people we know, etc. Is that the right move? For us, right now, it seems to be.
> As a parent of a now-13 year old, I’m disappointed that COPPA hasn’t been updated after companies have gone aggressively after children.
COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)
There is historical precedent for limiting access for children. Children can't legally buy cigarettes, alcohol, lottery tickets, firearms (of which owning is a constitutional right), or enter certain prohibited places. Unfortunately, I many service providers have abused their access to children and acted as if children can legally enter into some type of one sided quasi-contract. The bar for working with children at any physical location is huge and boundaries are well understood.
I know of exactly zero places I take my children (activities, sports, clubs, etc.) that would speak to them privately to coerce them to use that service more without parental consent. That's what Meta and a million other online services are doing to children.
I was shocked over the summer when I received an email saying I was going to lose some of the Xbox controls we have in place, as if 13 was some milestone of maturity and self-control. AFAICT, I’m legally responsible for my children until they’re 18, and at least at the moment, they are completely dependent on their parents for food, shelter, and transportation. Just because they’re online, I don’t abdicate my responsibility as their guardian, but companies think it’s a good idea to allow kids to bypass the restrictions that were in place because they’ve reached an age that was meant as a minimal age for tracking in a very young Internet.
Unfortunately for our kids, we’ve become extremely restrictive to the service they have access to, they can only use platforms that allow communicating with people we know, etc. Is that the right move? For us, right now, it seems to be.