Top Five Reasons Why COPPA Fails

COPPA otherwise known as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is a law passed in 1998 by the Federal Trade Commission forcing website operators marketing their sites to children under 13 in any way to place restrictions on collection of personally identifiable information from such children. COPPA requires all children under 13 to have verifiable and valid parental consent when submitting PII(personally identifying information) and if the parents consent they can alter the child's information and revoke the consent at their discretion. Fail to comply with COPPA can result in heavy fines to operators reaching up to $1,000,000 dollars.



1. Parents get unlimited access to their child's online account.


Allowing parents unlimited access to their child's information is clearly a violation of privacy. Allowing parents to modify the information is even worse, because is strips children of the privacy to deserve. Children should portray themselves on line however they wish. Parents should not be allowed to deactivate their child's online accounts and parents should be strictly forbidden from accessing their children's online accounts in the first place. COPPA encourages parents to hack into their children's accounts and monitor them often without their child's knowledge. What COPPA encourages would otherwise be considered hacking in any other case.


2.COPPA does nothing to prevent predators and hackers from attaining a child's information.

It only requires parental permission when a child provides PII to a website operator. COPPA takes no steps to ensure that the information is kept safe from spyware, malware, or online predators. In fact it enforces invasive monitoring by the parent.

3. Many websites go overboard.

The majority of websites that collect PII find it too tedious to obtain parental permission and therefore they restrict under 13's all together from registering on their websites. Such websites enforce harsh and degrading TOU's of privacy policies to make their laziness clear. A prime example of this is Justin.tv. Its privacy policy states:

"If you are under 13 years of age, then do not access the JUSTIN.TV PLATFORM AT ANY TIME OR IN ANY MANNER. Protecting the privacy of the young is especially important to us. For that reason Justin.tv does not knowingly collect or maintain personally identifiable information from children under 13."-Justin.tv Privacy Policy.

This harsh, insulting and discriminatory statement goes far beyond what is required of COPPA. It restricts out of pure laziness, and misinterprets what COPPA is.

4. Why children under 13?

The FTC has the belief that children under 13 cannot understand the provisions of online judgement and therefore requires parents with assumed "better judgement" to maintain a child's information, when in fact, children are just as aware if not more online than their parents. Children today have a vast pool of knowledge about the internet and know its dangers. Most children know more than their parents who are not of the technology generation about the internet.


5. Kids can easily bypass age screening mechanisms.

COPPA is really useless in its misguided principles, and cannot be properly enforced, because kids can so easily lie about their age, and there is no foolproof way for websites to screen the age of its visitors and kids usually expect restrictions.