FTC Says Kids and Gambling Are A Bad Bet
Charles Carreon
Well that's a government agency with a talent for understatement, wouldn't you say? In June, 2002, the FTC did a survey of 100 popular Internet gambling sites and discovered that one in five had no warnings for minors, most had disclaimers that were hard to find, and lacked screening mechanisms to keep kids out or that were easily circumvented. The report doesn't even note that none of these gambling sites have COPPA-compliant privacy policies, even though based on the FTC COPPA rule, they should. For starters, we certainly have “empirical evidence of the ages of website visitors” — that's what the hue and cry is all about. And gambling websites use games and animated characters and offer prizes. Additionally, users will be asked to give personal information in order to wager — exactly what COPPA forbids offering to children! The FTC can be quite adept at overlooking an elephant in its own living room.
FTC Chairman Tim Muris investigated at the request of Representative Frank Wolf, R-Va., who accused the Bush administration of not doing enough to protect children from online gambling. With this kind of noise, you would have thought that a regulation or something was coming out. However, so far the results of the survey don't seem to have spurred any action, and the FTC has issued only platitudes, basically telling parents to make sure they lock up their credit cards so their kids don't gamble them into the poor house. With regard to the regulation of online gambling in general, the FTC does not appear to be taking any aggressive action.
Well that's a government agency with a talent for understatement, wouldn't you say? In June, 2002, the FTC did a survey of 100 popular Internet gambling sites and discovered that one in five had no warnings for minors, most had disclaimers that were hard to find, and lacked screening mechanisms to keep kids out or that were easily circumvented. The report doesn't even note that none of these gambling sites have COPPA-compliant privacy policies, even though based on the FTC COPPA rule, they should. For starters, we certainly have “empirical evidence of the ages of website visitors” — that's what the hue and cry is all about. And gambling websites use games and animated characters and offer prizes. Additionally, users will be asked to give personal information in order to wager — exactly what COPPA forbids offering to children! The FTC can be quite adept at overlooking an elephant in its own living room.
FTC Chairman Tim Muris investigated at the request of Representative Frank Wolf, R-Va., who accused the Bush administration of not doing enough to protect children from online gambling. With this kind of noise, you would have thought that a regulation or something was coming out. However, so far the results of the survey don't seem to have spurred any action, and the FTC has issued only platitudes, basically telling parents to make sure they lock up their credit cards so their kids don't gamble them into the poor house. With regard to the regulation of online gambling in general, the FTC does not appear to be taking any aggressive action.