COPPA

COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is a mostly useless but well intended piece of legislation LiveJournal and other websites must comply by. If you try and register with an birthdate under thirteen years of age, LiveJournal will not let you use the account or register another account until some adult verification has taken place, generally by the use of a credit card, although avenues involving sending copies of government based photo IDs are also available.

COPPA is idiotic because all a young child has to do in order to register would be to NOT GIVE THEIR REAL BIRTHDAY, so its success relies entirely on the supposed inability of twelve year old children to lie, which any parent can attest the falsehood of. Meanwhile, any suitably aged person accidentally giving an underage birthday by accident ends up with a frustrating set of hoops to jump through. Although LiveJournal's policy says you will not be able to register another account if you tried to register one flagged as underage, there has to be some mechanism to keep track of the attempts:


 * If the mechanism is IP based, the use of a proxy, computer in a different location, or waiting until the IP cycles for some ISPs should be sufficient to bypass the problem.
 * If the mechanism is cookie based, clearing cookies should work. LJ sets a cookie called "ljuniq" that is the probable culprit.

In conclusion, THINK OF THE CHILDREN.