Bad Web Parents

摘要

Try this quick quiz on Internet privacy: Which scares you more, a Web site operator collecting personal data from your 12-year-old daughter in a survey about her favorite boy band, or your 12-year-old daughter asking you to e-mail your credit card number to the Walt Disney Company? As it happens, I have a 12-year-old daughter, and I don't much like either choice—but it's exactly the sort of bizarre box that the federal government is painting parents into with its recently implemented Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.