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Probably not directly applicable to you, but I thought I'd share my experience: "The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information from children under 13. The new rules spell out what a Web site operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online." One of the reasons I didn't become a web developer in grade school is that when this bill was first written, Geocities decided to comply by modifying their TOS, and then unilaterally terminating edit access to a 12-year-old's account. After turning 13, they refused to reinstate or accept another signup from the same email due to TOS violations. The site remained up, though thankfully without any personal info on it. You can imagine the countermeasures I took after that against a similar attack. Teaching the children that they have to lie and ignore contractual/legal restrictions to do anything useful becomes a standard very early that continues through their contact with music, games, movies, pornography, filesharing, alcohol, drugs, and hookups. "Protect the Children" is an easy, cowardly rallying cry for a Joe Lieberman or a Tipper Gore, but teaching them that all the good stuff happens behind an adult's/corporation's back robs them of their free will within the bounds of the law, and of their respect for anything the powers that be are trying to do. It is my contention that internet pseudonymity / anonymity is a treasured part of our culture, and part of the way we route around damage. It is essentially required of our minors due to the way we disenfranchise them while simultaneously requiring an online presence for a lot of personally & socially beneficial activities. The hideous notion recently brought up of criminalizing a TOS violation and tying it to jail-time would largely shut minors out of the Internet altogether, by any reasonable cautionary standard. A constellation of laws which requires broad criminality, and is completely selectively enforceable, brings the status of rule of law itself into question. On this November 6, let's say this: I don't think minors would be in quite so dire of a position if we could all (read: All American Citizens) vote. |