One of the IRC Networks I work with (UCCN) is looking at a proposal drawn up recently to allow children under 13 to join us and chat on the network. To begin with, it looked very difficult to do this in a law abiding manner. Then it looked really easy. After studying the “How to Comply” page on the FTC site, it turns out it is somewhere in the middle.

While it will indeed require some changes in the network configuration, as well as in staff policies and such, the most difficult aspect is the consent phase. Ensuring that parents are who they say they are (or at least having a record that verifies to a legal standard that they are who they say they are) is the hardest thing to do.

All in all, the best method found so far is a signed form from the parent sent by post, or by fax. For our purposes, this will also hold some verification information, and technical details regarding the children in particular.

It also means network changes, only permitting underage users to do specific things, and blocking anything else that might endanger them, or that would be out of our control as administrators, and their guardians while on the network.

The other difficulty is going to be designing and building a secure database system for storing the personal information, that will log who accesses what. This is one of my areas of expertise, however, so it shouldn’t be too high on the hard-scale.