Facebook has patented a system that lets children under 13 create accounts with parental supervision.
The patent application describes how a child seeking to join Facebook would first have to get a parent’s approval through the parent’s own Facebook account.
However, parents would then have the option to set privacy controls and to limit and monitor the kinds of content, friends and third-party applications available to the child.
Currently, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) makes it hard for Facebook, and other websites that collect information, to allow users younger than 13 to join.
Under the law, websites which cater to kids 12 and younger are restricted in the personal information they can collect, and must obtain “verifiable parental consent” for underage users.
Teenagers now have a widening array of options to choose from when they turn 13, including Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter’s Vine and Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp.
Of course, plenty of children under 13 already use Facebook, since it’s as simple as falsifying their birth date when registering for an account. A Consumer Reports study from 2012 estimated that 5.6 million kids younger than the official threshold were on the social network.
Facebook’s patent application focuses largely on how parental supervision settings could be configured. “The verified parent of a child user provides the social network system with administrative settings that are used by the social networking system,” according to the filing, “along with the child user’s age, to regulate the child user’s access ….”
Allowing kids under 12 onto Facebook would bring a new demographic and with a new demographic comes a new, potentially lucrative new marketing target for the social network.
View patent below