The company has announced that children will need parental consent to use their services

Jun 28, 2013 06:23 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo plans to alter the protection rules for children on its website ahead of the coming into effect of a new amendment ruled by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The updated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) aims to strengthen privacy protection for children under 13, as well as to give parents more control over the personal information that websites are allowed to collect from them.

The new law comes in effect July 1, as per last year’s announcement.

Now, Yahoo is taking a proactive step and wants to change some things ahead of time.

For instance, children below 12 years old won’t be able to log into the company’s services by June 30 unless they have been given consent by their parents.

According to Yahoo, parents and guardians of users that have under 12 years old will receive an email that asks for their consent to allow the child to continue using the services provided by the company.

If consent is not given until August 31, Yahoo will deem the account inactive. The child’s account is deleted, along with data associated with the account such as emails and contacts. It is, however, possible to download this type of data ahead of time.

Yahoo isn’t the only company that is already taking steps to comply with the new rules.

Google sent out emails to its Blogger users to warn them that their sites would be removed by month’s-end if they do not remove all adverts and links that lead to external sites hosting adult content.

The COPPA rule has come into discussion quite frequently when the topic of Facebook and underage users came up.

Facebook tried to oppose the FTC decision last year, claiming that such a regulation would restrict the right to free speech, thus raising issue of the First Amendment.