Minors Revisited
This has opened up an interesting can of worms.
By doing our business in the US, and having our server in the US, according to the FTC and COPPA (which is where the law is cited as requiring parental consent for collecting information about children under 13) DO have jurisdiction over us… Though I think they’d have a hard time actually pursuing the $11,000 per incident fine or jail sentences since we are British citizens and US law does not apply to us, they would and could easily make life for the server very difficult.
With this in mind, and because we’d rather be law abiding in any case, I shall have to go look into ways we can comply better with this.
Either way, we will NOT be banning under 13’s for using the site, there are some specific exclusions to COPPA which we can (if necessary) implement to ensure we are within the law, though they’ll require some thinking about and potentially the re-instatement of our original rules that we reserve the right to delete offensive diaries, since we’d just be open to all manner of abuse.
Oh how I love this site… *sigh*