Verifying online kids' ages: Key Q for parents

"State attorneys general have called for [online] communities, particularly MySpace, to improve age and identity checks," the Associated Press reports in an article picked up by hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations, and news sites nationwide. What parents need to know is that the attorneys general are not just calling for tech safeguards. If they want verification of minors' ages, they're also calling for publicly available information on children, something that, up to this point, local, state, and federal US governments have worked hard at not allowing in order to protect kids' privacy, ID verification experts tell me.

No technology is going to protect online kids all by itself, including the age-verification kind. In this case, the simple reason is that technology is only part of the equation – it needs information in public records to check against. Info that authenticates people (proves they are who they say they are) is only available on adults - credit information, driver's licenses, voting records, property records, etc. There is no public information on minors available at the national level, and at the state level only a little more than half of the states make drivers' info publicly available. At a local level, schools keep records on kids under 16, but that information is kept private, and parents have to sign permission slips for student contact info to go into school directories. The $64k question is: How many parents want birth and residence records on their children in a national database? For examples of child ID verification in use now, please this week's issue of my newsletter.