Ethics Assignment #3（Select one of the laws you examined last week）

Privacy (COPPA): The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information from children under 13. The new rules spell out what a Web site operator must include in a privacy policy, when and how to seek verifiable consent from a parent and what responsibilities an operator has to protect children's privacy and safety online.

Law is not 100% perfect  because some special situation can show it’s vulnerability. The law COPPA is a good way to protect children’s information. It can avoid they send their families information online. For a harmonious Family, COPPA is a good law to this family privacy information. On the other hand, if a family is discordant family, the law can not protect children. Also this law will become  weapon for parent who have violent tendency. For example, there is a discordant family. This family’s children were under 13 and faced with violence by their parent. These children was afraid to ask help from school, and they did not know they could ask for help. Therefore, social media tools could help them to spread out what happen in their family. Maybe it was the fast way to let more people know, and people could give them help. However, COPPA was not allowed social medias’ operator to let children who were under 13 spread out their family’s information online.  Also parent had right to cancel all the content from their children. In this situation, COPPA can not protect children, and it becomes a obstacle for children who are asking for help.

When children are suffering from family violence, I think social medias’ operator have right to break COPPA. If these children can not publish their family situation, people may not know what is going on. The probability of they are rescuing will be low. Reference to Scheuerman's article on Snowden, why Snowden will break law to publish some document from NAS? He knew this document record State was violation of the privacy of citizens. He wanted more people to know what was the truth even though he would be in a dangerous situation. He also claimed that ‘Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.’ When a law was against peace, we should do the right thing to against this. Snowden knew NAS did something not right, so he stand up to against it. It was similar to COPPA. When COPPA can not protect children and hurt children, we need to break this law to protect children. It also is civic duty because this law effect peace.  Snowden said that “every person, every nation, to live free from persecution, and to seek and enjoy asylum”. Therefore, when children suffer violence from parent, social medias’ operator should have right to break COPPA to publish their family’s situation.

Why people will create a law because it was a standard to protect our life.  The Principe of COPPA was protect children’s information. It mean it should be used for protecting children. If it can not protect children, it has lost it function. Therefore, when children was suffer violence from parent, it would be morally acceptable to break that law.