The Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule also known as the COPPA, it is a rule designed to protect information about chiildren under the age of 13. If there is a child on a site that is under the age of 13 and the owner of the site is collecting information such as address, phone number, a FULL name, e-mail address. The rule also protects collecting information like hobbies, interests and information collected through cookies or other types of tracking mechanisms. So basicly if you want to get to know your website visitors at all in collecting information that will enable you to track down or contact this child in any way you must compy with the COPPA rules which is basicly have a COPPA form somewhere on your site for an example of the form please click HERE... As of April 21, 2000 this rule was put into effect...

for more detailed information you can go to this site HERE and get more information

before, i had no ideal what COPPA was..and so i am sharing it with people in the webmaking world!

thanx pal for providing us the information which I've been so long unaware of it. I thought that Online Privacy rules are common but now I knew that there are seperate rules for children. Thanx for the information pal.

The newer generation are now more involved online and their privacy becomes very important because children become an easy prey online. Mostly children are not accompained by elders or parents when they go online. So these regulations provide a safegaurd to the Children below 13.

yeah, and allot of the children under thirteen are normally online in some chat room talking about nickelodean, and no offense to some of the parents out there but they dont really care what their kids look at..i know many friends who have other brothers who get their younger brothers to look at porn online...and the parents either, dont know and or dont give a rats left kidney. and i think that is being a bad parent..but thats me..and im glad i could inform ya

This post has been edited by Albus Dumbledore: Feb 17 2006, 01:58 AM

yes i agree with you all, because we have some parents in the world today that dont even give a heck abouth there childrens.

Wow. I never knew that before! That's quite a clever thing actually. I've seen it around quite a lot but I never knew why it was there. Thanks!

I had this on my phpnukeplatinum some time ... I think this is stupid ... I mean it is ok to try to prottect the children but who is gonna get that premmision from the parents for entering/registering on a forum =?!
A bit stupid if you ask me ...

well atleast with this if you ever get accused of anything by the police you can pul out the form and show them that you had permission from the parent to be on the website....if ya think its stupid thats your opinion but i think it is smart..lol

Thanks, I sorta had an idea about that and you know its used in PHBB Board when you sign up for regestrations, and I think IPB has a better option for using it, but the site I used to run, was high school and no on under 13 was on so... it really did not make sense to enable it. But its good in other cases where it makes sense.

Actually COPPA, if you noticed, is not a rule, but an official government Act (hence the "A").

I agree with croman, the idea of COPPA for registering at websites is stupid, but it means you cannot be done for getting information from under 13s. As long as you do not ask for personally indentifyable information, however, COPPA does not affect you.

(My site does not get any information from Children apart from if their age is below 13, and since that is not information that is personally intifiable (I don't ask what their age is, but simply if it is less than 13 years), I am immune to the COPPA. I still ask for a parent's permission for access into forums, however, just to guarantee that they can't make me liable for Forum Content, and also, to remove any liability to any details the child enters about himself in the forums.)

This post has been edited by NDPA: Mar 5 2006, 03:13 AM