Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-45571174-20200917215136/@comment-25014407-20200921022838

The only ones I've seen complaining on this thread about federal and international laws are usually either one of two things: either they're breaking or have broken the law themselves and they think it's "stupid" because it affects them, or they don't know anything about it and just follow others almost mindlessly because it affects people they've met even though they weren't allowed (saying "I GOT BANNED FOR NO REASON").

For almost any commercial website, the information that is stored is not necessarily information that is put on someone's profile, like age, address, full name or whatever (it can be stored and often also is!), but also has to do with email addresses, IP addresses, browser (or website) history, and payment information. On Facebook, you can request all the data that it has ever collected from you (not sure if that's only in Europe though), and when I did it a few years back, it took me a few hours to go through it all. One of the reasons this law was accepted is so that younger kids don't get targeted commercials to get persuaded by. A lot of commercial companies sell this data to third-parties, such as advertisers, to make sure that an advertiser can target a specific target market. Imagine a minor getting ads about toys or Minecraft (at least paid services) and an adult getting ads about betting services or any other 18+ services. The "adult" can usually handle their own money with care, while the minor doesn't always know the boundaries of how much money they are allowed to spend, because it's their parents', and not their own. To allow a bit of leeway for these advertisers, this age limit was set at 13 and not higher. Almost every country has a law like this in some form, but Fandom (and Facebook, Google...) always has to follow COPPA as an American company, as it's processing data from minors, not just collecting. The data that Fandom collects, sells, or uses can be found in the privacy policy. As someone said before, if you lie about your age, it means that you are already breaking the Terms of Use.

Recently, it was seen that kids of these ages still get targeted ads, mainly because they lie about their age on registration. GDPR and CCPA were created to de facto make the rule stricter, seeing that users below 16 or 18 are not able to handle their own money (or advertisements, for that matter). An example here is Minecraft and Fortnite being among the highest grossing games on Google Play, games or apps that are initially directed towards a younger target group. For this reason, they've said that any company that is collecting data from this region (California/EEG) has to comply to these regulations, and the relevant clause here is that any user from these regions must be older than 16 to register.

These are just brief and simplified versions, because younger kids are stubborn as hell and usually are not open to facts that don't follow their opinions.