Coping With COPPA

The Children’s Advertising Review Unit recently held that screening for age to avoid collecting personal information from children under 13 was not enough. In Bandai America (the website is Bandai’s Wireless.com site), CARU found that although Bandai’s website had a screening mechanism that asked for a date of birth, there was no tracking once a child put in a birth date. Thus, anyone under 13 could come back and enter a different (inaccurate) date of birth to get by the screen. CARU’s COPPA compliance guidelines require that not only must interactive sites have an age screening mechanism, but there also must be some reasonably effective means of tracking so children can’t get around the screening process. Forewarned is forearmed.