FTC Seeks Comment on New Parental Consent Mechanism Under COPPA
FTC Seeks Comment on New Parental Consent Mechanism Under COPPA
The Federal Trade Commission is seeking comment on an application from the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and others for a new mechanism for obtaining parental consent
Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?
I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can't believe there's enough ground swell for the government to step in on ... What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.
Anti-LGBTQ+ people have shifted (back, this isn't new) to arguing that any exposure to anybody or anything that isn't completely hetero-normative, to be "child abuse". The internet is one of the few things many children in particularly backwards states (looking at you Florida and Texas) still have that can show them the truth/reality about gender and sexuality. So naturally, conservatives are desperately looking for ways to stop that.
Meanwhile, the blatant, real sexual abuse and grooming of children is mainly happening in the church and in the home. There's a reason these parents don't want their children understanding the very very basics of sexuality, their bodies, and what is right/wrong when it comes to adults touching them. And it ain't because they care about their wellbeing.
A kid can't rat you out if they don't know the word for what you're doing, or that it's even wrong in the first place. How convenient for them.
This is exactly it right here. It's part of the continuing effort to eradicate queer people from public life and to ban any and all discussion of topics that aren't strictly cishet.
It’s kind of hard to believe that all people trying to censor LGBTQ+ and basic sex ed are doing it with the nefarious intent of making sure child abuse is easier. I do not assume my garden-variety homophobe who wants it censored in schools as well as basic sex ed is also a pedophile. It’s part of it for some of them, yes. But for the rest, it’s just that most won’t care that deprivation of sex ed also means making it harder to report pedophiles, because they think learning the truth about sex is a more dangerous and realistic harm because something something degenerate lifestyle. And they might also blame a child victim for being too sexual, because bad things only happen to bad people so of course the child did something to bring it on themselves, and of course their child would never do something like that so no need to worry about pedophilia. But they’re not pedophiles themselves.
Oh you know the usual "think of the children" disguise to pass something intrusive.
Okay, so this isn't a new law or regulation. This is the ESRB and a couple companies requesting approval for a new method of providing verifiable parental consent to be acceptable to use for the purpose of satisfying COPPA's existing requirements. From what I can find, the current approved methods of verifying parental consent appear to be:
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submitting a signed form or a credit card
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talking to trained personnel via a toll-free number or video chat
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answering a series of knowledge-based challenge questions
Instead this would be handing the device to a parent, they snap a selfie and it gets analyzed for age estimation to determine if the person providing parental consent is an adult.
Good or bad, too invasive, idk, not really making a judgement there myself. I'd imagine the companies want this so they don't have to have as many trained personnel and it's probably less likely to be a barrier to consent as compared to putting in a credit card, talking to someone, or answering whatever knowledge-based challenges they use.
Thank you, that's good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.
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