Consolidated Review of Profiling High-School Students with Facebook: How Online Privacy Laws Can Actually Increase Minors’ Risk

While the paper implicates this problem to unintended consequences of COPPA, I would lay more of the blame on Facebook for not properly validating members' ages. While this perhaps would not be in Facebook's financial interests, it seems to be that these results demonstrate that by not doing this, they are in fact not meeting the spirit of the COPPA law. To make an analogy, suppose a law gave an incentive for people to lie to banks (many such laws exist). If banks turned a blind eye to such lying since it was in their financial interest, I doubt one would conclude that they are blameless.