Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.1.11 | As we’ve reported before, millions of children under the age of 13 have signed up for Facebook and other social networks despite the fact that these networks, aiming to comply with federal regulations, prohibit users under 13. A group of researchers published an excellent paper this week that looks more closely at parental involvement in circumventing these age restrictions and offers important considerations for policy makers.

“Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the ‘Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act,’” is authored by danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz and John Palfrey. It appears in First Monday, an online peer-reviewed journal. Here’s the abstract:

Facebook, like many communication services and social media sites, uses its Terms of Service (ToS) to forbid children under the age of 13 from creating an account. Such prohibitions are not uncommon in response to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which seeks to empower parents by requiring commercial Web site operators to obtain parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. Given economic costs, social concerns, and technical issues, most general–purpose sites opt to restrict underage access through their ToS. Yet in spite of such restrictions, research suggests that millions of underage users circumvent this rule and sign up for accounts on Facebook.

Given strong evidence of parental concern about children’s online activity, this raises questions of whether or not parents understand ToS restrictions for children, how they view children’s practices of circumventing age restrictions, and how they feel about children’s access being regulated. In this paper, we provide survey data that show that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site’s restrictions and that they are often complicit in helping their children join the site. Our data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, COPPA inadvertently undermines parents’ ability to make choices and protect their children’s data. Our data have significant implications for policy–makers, particularly in light of ongoing discussions surrounding COPPA and other age–based privacy laws.

The authors, who surveyed 1,007 U.S. parents age 26 and over who have children living with them between the ages of 10–14, found that the majority of parents whose children signed up while underage were involved in the process and thus knew about the age requirements. Their research led them to conclude that when it comes to online privacy and safety, “[P]arents are not interested in approaches that lead to curbing children’s access but rather in approaches that provide more support for their involvement in children’s decision–making process while treating access as a given.”

And when it comes to legislative or regulatory solutions, policy makers would be smart to look at the unintended effects of COPPA as well as the failures: “As long as the emphasis of the regulatory approach remains on age–based cutoffs and onerous consent mechanisms, it is likely that general–purpose Web sites will continue to block access to anyone under the age cutoff. In response, parents who wish for their children to participate on such sites will continue to assist their children in deceptively circumventing such restrictions. This is neither a solution to privacy and online safety concerns nor a way of empowering parents.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is already on record saying he’d like to make Facebook more age-appropriate for younger users, but it’s not something the company has invested in so far.

“Because of the restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process,” Zuckerberg said earlier this year. “If they’re lifted then we’d start to learn what works. We’d take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe.”

Plus: Sarah recently wrote about the concerns of commercialism and marketing aimed at children in online spaces such as Facebook. And cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito talks about Facebook as a learning site.