Today I got a very interesting email. The email originated from one of my own websites. The email content begins thusly:
Welcome to BrawlStages.com Forums
In compliance with the COPPA act your account is currently inactive.
At first I thought that for some strange reason my website (BrawlStages.com) had been shut down by The Man for violation of some obscure law. Reading further, I pieced together that I was being forwarded an email from one of the forum’s users that had been sent to him by my website. The forwarded email continued:
Please print this message out and have your parent or guardian sign and date it. Then fax it to:
By this point in the email I was thinking that there was some sort of scam going on. My next move was to google “COPPA act”, which apparently stands for “Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act act”, and is a real thing. By this point I’m very confused, because my forum does not enforce COPPA.
As it turns out, yes it does.
The forum I use is a prepackaged thing that I downloaded, and the first question it asks you when you try to sign up for an account on the forum is whether or not you are at least thirteen years old. I had never really paid attention to this question, nor explored what happens if you say you are not thirteen or older. As you can probably guess by now, it gives you a form that you are supposed to have your parents fill out so you can email or fax back to the site admin.
The email continued. (I’ve changed the names and other personal data before posting it here).
—————————— CUT HERE ——————————
Permission to Participate at BrawlStages.comUsername: Ralph23
Password: asdf1234
Email: ralph23@hotmail.comI HAVE REVIEWED THE INFORMATION PROVIDED BY MY CHILD AND HEREBY GRANT PERMISSION TO BrawlStages.com TO STORE THIS INFORMATION.
I UNDERSTAND THIS INFORMATION CAN BE CHANGED AT ANY TIME BY ENTERING A PASSWORD.
I UNDERSTAND THAT I MAY REQUEST FOR THIS INFORMATION TO BE REMOVED FROM BrawlStages.com AT ANY TIME.Parent or Guardian (print your name here): __hank___________________
(sign here): ______________ralph____
Date: ______wed 24 dec 2008_________
—————————— CUT HERE ————–i dont understand this part—————-
Once the administrator has received the above form via fax or regular mail your account will be activated.
Logging into the admin panel on my website, I indeed found this user with an inactive account. I activated it.
But a few things got me about this whole thing.
Firstly, BrawlStages.com has been up and running for almost a year now, and this is the first time I’ve ever gotten one of these emails. Every other kid who’s signed up in the last nine months has either gotten to the parental content form and decided it wasn’t worth it, or has (smartly) lied and said he’s thirteen. The fact that this kid actually went to the trouble of getting his parents to sign and email me the consent form is kind of amazing.
Secondly, I have no proof that the email actually did come from his parents. I changed the names but left the first-names-only quality and capitalization intact, and it does kind of look like a half-assed forgery. I have to assume that it is genuine, because if the kid was going to go through all the trouble of forging a parental content form, why wouldn’t he just say he was thirteen? Nevertheless, the underlying ineffectiveness of COPPA shines through.
Finally, this whole process has been contradictory to COPPA’s stated intent to protect children. When I told a coworker about this transaction, the first thing he said was “String him along. I have no evidence your parents gave you permission to visit this website. Please have them fax a signed note to….” Even ignoring the fact that I accidentally gave away the kid’s name and email address when I pasted the email to my coworker, it would arguably be a cakewalk to string him along — he’s under thirteen and apparently gullible enough to think I’m going to check into whether all my new forum users are really how old they say they are, neither of which I would have known if he had just lied about his age like the rest of the internet. And then he would have been safe among the faceless crowd, instead of the one 12-year-old who made me activate his account by hand. I’m about a million times more likely to fuck with him now than if he hadn’t sent in that consent form — all he’s done is made himself a target.
Go COPPA.