Children under the age of 13 will soon have a way to trade, add friends, and complete other tasks in Pokemon Go using the new “Niantic Kids” log-in system.
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Pokemon Go announced that they had teamed up with SuperAwesome to create “Niantic Kids,” a new way to help parents manage their children’s privacy settings. The new system will give parents a way to review their child’s permissions before playing and provides options to control what information gets shared with Pokemon Go.
Because of child privacy and advertising laws, Pokemon Go was unable to provide certain features to players under a certain age. For instance, since it’s illegal to advertise to children in certain countries, younger players weren’t able to interact with sponsored gyms and PokeStops…which also meant they had less opportunities to participate in EX-Raids.
Likewise, children under the age of 13 were also unable to use the recently added friendship and trading features, much to the dismay of both the kids and their parents. Not only did the lack of trading prevent kids from completing their PokeDexes, it also hurt their ability to interact with other players…which was supposedly a core tenet of the game. This caused one parent to even create a Change.org petition to bring awareness of the issue…although the petition never succeeded in hitting its relatively modest signatures goal.
Pokemon Go hasn’t announced when the new log-in option will take place, but it will probably happen in the next week or so. And while it won’t affect the majority of players, it will help the next generation of Pokemon Go players (and their parents) enjoy the game as much as everyone else.
