Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites

Part 3: Privacy and safety issues

Close to half of online teens have said they were older in order to access a website or online service.

In order to comply32 with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), many general audience websites that collect personal information from their users require that users they are at least 13 years old.33 This includes popular sites like Facebook and YouTube, all of whom ask users to confirm that they meet this age requirement when setting up an account. Other websites that contain adult-oriented material such as alcohol-related advertising or sexually explicit material may require the user to be at least 18 or 21 years of age.

However, close to half of online teens (44%) admit to lying about their age at one time or another so they could access a website or sign up for an online account. When we asked a similar question in 2000, two years after COPPA’s enactment, just 15% of online teens admitted to lying about their age to gain access to a website.34 Websites are not currently required to verify a user’s age, and there is an ongoing debate35 about whether or not such verification is technically and practically possible.

Boys and girls are equally likely to say they were older to gain access to a website or service. These incidents of “inaccurate” reporting could have occurred at any point in the child’s internet-using years, and as such, the variations by age are difficult to interpret. The youngest group of teens in our sample, those ages 12-13, are more likely than 17-year-olds to say they have lied about their age (49% vs. 30%).

Notes

32 Or more technically, to avoid having to comply with COPPA, which requires that companies that have knowledge of youth under 13 on their site gain verifiable parental consent for the collection of any personal information from that child.

33 For more information on COPPA compliance, see: http://www.coppa.org/comply.htm

34 In the December 2000 survey, the question wording was: “Have you ever said you were older than you are so you could get onto a web site?” And a further note: That question was asked at a time before the most popular forms of social media came into being, and just after the FTC finished rule-making guidance for COPPA. One major concern of the policy community then and now is children’s access to adult content.

35 Palfrey, J., Sacco, D., boyd, d. (2008) “Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies: Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce,” Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf/

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The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center. The Center is supported by The Pew Charitable Trust.