On April 21, 2000, the United States enacted a law called COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), to help protect children online. While this law primarily impacts sites that collect information about their readers, especially when their readers are under 13 years old, most sites should be aware of the law and other privacy tools in use on the Web.

Web Design Services that are directed towards children under 13 must: post their privacy policy, get parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information about a child, get new consent when the information collection practices change, allow parents to review the information collected about their child and allow parents to revoke their consent.

For example, the Web Design site is not specifically directed towards children under the age of 13, so technically, COPPA doesn't apply. But the children's channel on About does, and so there have been many changes to the About Kids channel. But even if your site doesn't have to comply with COPPA, it's a good idea to follow it. If you do, you'll improve consumer confidence in your site.

Basically, there are two ways of handling parental controls: review by an independent group of the Web site(s) in question, review by the Web developer herself of their own Web site and There are problems with each method.