In tiny fib online, risks for children

MATT RICHTEL; MIGUEL HELFT
International Herald Tribune
03-14-2011
In tiny fib online, risks for children
Byline: MATT RICHTEL; MIGUEL HELFT
Type: News

Millions of American children are lying about their age to dodge U.S. regulations for joining Web sites like Facebook, letting them loose in a digital world they may not be prepared to handle.

Across the United States, millions of children are lying about their ages so they can create accounts on popular sites like Facebook and Myspace. These sites require users to be 13 or older, to avoid U.S. regulations that apply to sites with younger members. But to children, that rule is a minor obstacle that stands between them and what everybody else is doing.
American parents regularly go along with the age inflation, giving permission and helping children set up accounts. They often see it as a minor fib that is necessary to let their children participate in the digital world.

Plenty of people fudge the truth about their age, whether to buy beer or project a younger image to potential mates. But researchers and other critics say allowing children to break the rules sends the wrong message. And, they argue, it sets children loose in a digital world they may not be prepared for -- exposing them to the real- life threats of inappropriate content, contact from strangers and the growing incidents of bullying by computer.

"Not only are kids lying about their age, but more often than not, parents teach them to lie about their age," said Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft.

Ms. Boyd said this ran counter to the goal of getting parents more constructively involved in children's online activities, which was one aim of the legislation that spawned the age restrictions in the first place.

At the same time, the practice is hard to stop, Web sites and U.S. officials say. Sites try to catch under-age users -- "We are not burying our head in the sand," said Joe Sullivan, the chief security officer at Facebook -- but verifying a person's age over the Internet is a task that ranges from tricky to nearly impossible.

Cristina Flores, 44, a nurse in San Francisco, said she had decided to allow her 11-year-old son to get onto Facebook rather than deny it to him and risk his signing up behind her back. Besides, she said, she did not realize there were age restrictions on the site.

"It's not like there's a legal age limit for being on the Internet," Ms. Flores said.

Her son Jake said he had told Facebook that he was 15: "I just picked something random."

In one of Jake's fifth-grade classes, 15 of the 30 students said they had Facebook accounts.

The risks for under-age members of social networks are not theoretical. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of Myspace, who now runs an Internet safety consulting business, recounted a recent incident from his business. In New York State, he said, an 11-year-old boy accepted a friend request on Facebook from a girl in his class. But the girl's account was fake, and the person behind it began posting images of the boy on sex-oriented sites, along with nasty comments.

When the boy's images started showing up in Google searches, the school suspected that he had posted them and summoned his parents. Other children began picking on him.

"It can be a living nightmare for an 11-year-old who just wanted to hang out with his friends," Mr. Nigam said.

In 2006, 31 percent of 12-year-olds in the United States were using social networks, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. That figure grew to 38 percent by 2009, when the survey was last done.

ComScore, a firm that measures Internet traffic, estimates that 3.6 million of Facebook's 153 million monthly visitors in the United States are younger than 12. Some of those visitors may not have Facebook accounts and may simply be visiting public pages, comScore said. (It reached that figure by cross-referencing its traffic analysis with demographics.)

Internet companies have set up the rules against under-age users because they must comply with the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1998, which says Web sites that collect information from children younger than 13 must obtain parental consent.

Obtaining that consent is complex and expensive, so companies like Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, reject anyone who tries to sign up using an age below 13. Google, Facebook and Yahoo all declined to talk about how many children jumped the barriers, but they say they tried to enforce the rules.

Mr. Sullivan of Facebook said the company blocked new registrations or deleted the accounts of thousands of under-age users every day.

Facebook has measures to protect older teenagers from predators, but children who pretend to be older than 18 are bypassing even those safeguards, which place restrictions on how widely minors can share information and who can contact them on the site.

The Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with enforcing the child protection act, acknowledges the problem. But Mary K. Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the commission, said there was no good solution.

"I don't think anyone knows how to prevent a kid from lying about their age," Ms. Engle said.

Copyright International Herald Tribune Mar 14, 2011