Yahoo has planned to bring out new protection rules for users under 12 from June 30, before the amendment of online child protection rule by the US Federal Trade Commission.
According to the announcement made by FTC last year, The latest updated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act is aiming for protecting the privacy of children under 13 with parental control over the personal details will come into effect from July 1.
One of the rule which will come into effect is that children below 12 years old won’t be able to log in to Yahoo by June 30 unless prior consent has been given by their parents.
Yahoo has said that guardians of below 12 year old users will be getting an email asking their permission to allow their child to use Yahoo products. The children will be intimated by the message reminding them for the parent consent when they try to log in their account.
Parents have to send in their consent before August 31, 2013; else the account will be made inactive. After the deletion of the account, all the data associated with the account will also be deleted. One can have the stored information downloaded before that from the account.
When a discussion is made on Facebook and its underage users, the COPPA rule comes up. But Facebook is against FTC as they think that government is restricting the ability of teen speech.
It is reported that Yahoo is not alone in taking this step. Recently, Google has sent an email to Blogger users about the account deletion by the month end, if they do not remove ads and links to external sites hoisting adult content. Though Google didn’t comment about this, but it is likely related to a requirement in the amended COPPA rule for operators to ensure that children’s personal information is released only to service providers and third parties that are capable of maintaining the confidentiality, security, and integrity of such information, and who assure that they will do so.