User blog comment:Semanticdrifter/Updates to COPPA/@comment-13301-20130624203653

At the time of writting this, underaged users are creating accounts anyway (obviously lying about their birth date on account creation), and end effectively adding personal information in their user profile, while anonymous users don't add any personal information, since they don't have userpages or profiles which invites them to add information about themselves. The only "personal information" that unregistered users have is their IP address, and really, this is not a harmful piece of personal information. The IP address is useless about personal information, it's only about location information, anything else.

With this new policy, unregistered users won't be able to edit anymore. That'd affect normal users that simply don't bother to create an account or are lazy to log in. But will affect also underaged users that still don't have an account and want to edit/continue editing as before. Some of them may want to still be able to edit, and they will be forced to create an account for that, even if the Terms of Use disallow that, and some of them will be forced to lie in the registration form about their age. Once registered, Wikia encourages a profile creation with all sort of personal information, so once they create an account they'd most likely add that personal information to Wikia that COPPA is trying to protect them from.

For me, this new policy will not protect underaged users, but would make them even more exposed as before to privacy concerns. And what is worse, many wikis will lose the valuable contributions of many of those unregistered users, underaged or not, because of this arbitrary decision.