Xanga Fined for Allowing Underage Kids to Join

It's a safe bet that lots of kids are fudging their birth dates to set up pages on social networking web sites, such as MySpace and Xanga, which require you to be 13 or older to sign up. But the federal government fined Xanga today for $1 million for allowing people to set up accounts even if the birth dates entered make it clear they are not quite 13.

The Federal Trade Commission levied the fine—the largest in FTC history—under the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which says parental notification and consent are required for commercial web sites to collect personal information from children under age 13.

The FTC also said that Xanga's policies regarding children were not clear and that parents had no way to access and control their children's information. The commission estimated that during the past five years, 1.7 million Xanga accounts were registered with birth dates that indicated the members were under 13.

The response from Xanga, now 25 million members strong: CEO John Hiler said that many of the under-13 birth dates may have referred to pets, engagement dates, and "born-again" dates for religious bloggers, Cnet reports. Interesting observation, but the chief also said Xanga will be introducing new rules and standards to make the site safer for children.

It's also a safe bet that many of the parents of the kids under age 13 didn't have a clue that their kids were posting personal information about themselves on Xanga.

Brad Weber was certain his kids were not on social networking sites because he had blocked them on the family computer, and he had set browser controls since the kids were small to determine where they can and cannot go on the web.

But when his wife asked him to look into MySpace, he found that his 13-year-old daughter had created a MySpace page from a friend's computer. She had an open profile that told the public the name of her school and where she likes to shop. "I was so concerned about them downloading something bad," said the veteran software developer.  "It never dawned on me to tell them not to upload anything."

So Weber and Michael Edelson, a dad of three 13-year-old girls, launched BeNetSafe last month to track whether kids are on MySpace and to monitor if their pages are public or private and what they are posting on them. For a monthly subscription of $9.95 a month or $49.95 for a year, parents can access reports via the web or through weekly or monthly email reports. The reports link directly to kids' profiles and any photos they have posted.

Their timing is good. Next week, BeNetSafe adds Xanga to its monitoring service.