"Go back to the top of this article and reread that #transcript of Rep. Buddy Carter grilling #TikTok #CEO #ShouZiChew. Now, Carter is a dunderhead, but he’s dunderheaded in a way that illuminates just how bad #COPPA enforcement is, and has been, for 25 long years.
Carter thinks that TikTok is using biometric features to enforce COPPA. He imagines that TikTok is doing some kind of high-tech phrenology to make sure that every user is over 13 (“I find that [you aren’t capturing facial images] hard to believe. It is our understanding that they’re looking at the eyes. How do you determine what age they are then?”).
Chew corrects the Congressdunderhead from #Georgia, explaining that TikTok uses “age-gating”: “when you ask the user what age they are.”
That is the industry-wide practice for enforcing COPPA: every user is presented with a tick-box that says “I am over 13.” If they tick that box, the #company claims it has satisfied the requirement not to #spy on #kids.
But if COPPA were meaningfully enforced, companies would simply have to stop #spying on #everyone, because there are no efficient ways to verify the #age of users at the scale needed for general operation of a #website."
https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok-be08fbf94b0d