COPPA - Do you comply?

As I am not legally required to comply with COPPA on my site, I don't care what their age is. If I am apprised of a situation where someone is under 13 on the site than I will contact the individual and suspend their account.

 

Oh okay..

Users are able to enter their birth dates, but more times than not, they opt not to.

 

HF blocks all under 13 registrations which will keep my COPPA compliant. Occassionally I get a dumb member that admits to being under 13 and I ban them immediately. If you're gonna lie to register you have to continue lying.

I have in the past had sites allowing under 13 and I have kept COPPA records (faxes from parents signed). It's never been a real problem and I don't believe anyone has ever been prosecuted for not following COPPA. It's a fairly useless law imho. If you have a 10 year old on the internet as a parent you should know wtf they are doing. My young kids aren't allowed email accounts and any site they sign up for I have to approve them and signup myself.

 

i dont comply honestly i have read the info on coppa.org and have found that my site does not fall under the requirements of having coppa registration as it is not a commercial site collecting personal information from anyone under age 13 but if i ever did make a Pokemon forum i would make it coppa compliant lol

 

And pretty easy to circumvent, also. Most kids are smart enough not to enter their real birthdate in the first place, and those without parental supervision could easily forge their name and information on the form.

 

I deny registration to users under the age of 13. Since my sites deals with firearms, kids do not need to be on there anyway.

 

We deny registration to under 13. I used to work for Neopets and I have a fairly good understanding of COPPA and of predators and I would rather keep the younger ones off.

Plus, it dumbs down the forum if they are younger than 13, so... yeah. :p

 

I simply deny registration to users under 13, since if they actually wanted to join a forum anyway, they'd simply lie about their age in the first place.

 

Kids are smart they would just say they were 15 or something.

 

So true. But at least our butts are covered by attempting to be in compliance.

 

Haha yeh. Your atleast Legal But tbh on one of my forums it's a game and some younger users play as well so I woulden't put it on there at all.

 

COPPA is overbroad and can be challenged on a few different legal fronts should someone want to, not to mention the constitutional issues with it.

I do however, deny registrations also to those under 13 on most forums simply because its not targeted to them, or I know they won't have a intelligent thing to add.

 

Right, I think COPPA is more about covering your own butt in case something ever happens on your site and the FBI comes sniffing around.

 

I'm usually a proper-procedures nazi, but I have a pet hate of COPPA since I accidentally mentioned my age on a forum when I was 9 and had to shut down all the forums I ran at the time. They were all on Forumer, and none had over 90 members, so it didn't really matter, but I was mad at the time.

 

If you know (or perhaps even suspect -- I'm not sure) that a user is under 13, and you don't do anything about it (i.e. receive parental permission) then you are not in compliance.

 

Oh, we ban if someone says they are under 13.

:p

 

Well in the country where I live it isn't required and I actually don't care about the age of my members. I don't even force it on them however they may enter it if they wish.

 

My site could potentially attact users under the age of 13, but when their age is entered, if they try something under 13 then it will not let them register. Is this not enough to cover me? Do I need to fill out all the COPPA info? If so, where can I see this information? How will I know if a user is not 13?

 

We had a thread like this on virtual pet list.

I just deny under 13 and don't allow them to join.

 

In your case, you have decided to disallow use of your site by users aged 13 and under -- which is completely fine. Basically, you just need to make sure that no user on your site is in fact under 13 years old. If you discover that one is (somehow - i.e. they mention it), you must either a) deactivate their account or b) acquire proper documentation.