Google mulls enabling special accounts for children under age 13

One of the big concerns for parents and kids alike is online privacy. For adults, it is up to personal responsibility and decision. For people under 18 years of age, and particularly under the age of 13, there is legislation that expressly prohibits collection of data from minors for purposes of advertisements.

Of course, in a parallel universe, teenagers never lie so this is not a problem, but in our reality, teenagers do lie when they set up services like Facebook or Twitter, or Gmail. For those instances, companies are not liable for violating COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act).

However, the fact of the matter is, kids need access to online services. The demands for the use of technology continues to increase, and that poses challenges for kids and the services they want to use. Most online services have age restrictions (hence the lying from kids) in an effort avoid complications with COPPA. Microsoft has controls for parent with kids who have Live IDs, and those controls affect what kids can do with Windows Phone. Now, Google is examining ways to allow kids to set up accounts.

Such accounts would remain under parental control, and would allow access to services like YouTube (also with parental control). The trick is ensuring that everything remains compliant with COPPA. Naturally, privacy advocates are not thrilled with the idea, as if they are unaware that kids lie about their age online.

If Google deploys this feature, it would make sense to see this functionality make its way to kids who set up Android powered devices, and it would also allow parents to maintain parental controls over a kid’s use of Google services.