User blog comment:Semanticdrifter/Updates to COPPA/@comment-3393540-20130803153807

So... you are actually not complying with COPPA.

While COPPA is there to protect humans younger than 13 by notifying parents you think the costs for this is too high and simply restrict anyone younger than 13.

So you win here by having traffic that is <13 excluded. However you will get a zillion of user accounts that are fake, this will mess up you database, statistical algorithms you run on those and will mislead advertisers on statistics based on fake accounts. This in turn will piss of advertisers while your dba's run overtime thinking of ways to filter fake accounts.

At the same time anyone underage from a certain network who is blocked because you found out he/she is <13 results in all users from that same IP range to be blocked also so your helpdesk will run overhours with thousand of people complaining they will have been blocked.

At the same time you will notice that contributions on certain communities will drop, this traffic gets lost and competitors in other countries pick up those niches.

And then the worst happens: Based on your zillion fake accounts from <13 (created via all kinds of workarounds) you will still get COPPA'd.

And in the end the costs for buying a piece of analytical software and having 2/3 fte's processing the reports around it would have been a better choice. (to e.g. auto exclude queries running on the log data integrating with this tool to exclude a certain range of users) (you can have data but you may not run queries on it).


 * (lol)