Florida Pre-Teen’s Parents Ban Him From Facebook, So He Starts Own Social Network
Melbourne Beach, FL – What do you do when you’re 11-years-old and your parents won’t let you have your own Facebook profile? If you’re Zach Marks, you start your own kid-friendly social network.
Marks’s parents told him that Facebook wasn’t appropriate for kids his age, so with the help of his family, he decided to launch his own social network for kids his age, reports Local 6 news partner Florida Today.
The kid-Facebook is called GromSocial, and Marks, with the help of his siblings, created the characters on the site and manage much of its content.
Click Orlando reports that Darren Marks, Zach’s dad and founder of an energy drink and food company based in South Florida, quickly saw the potential for GromSocial in the social media market and officially registered it as a company in March. After launching just three months ago, GromSocial has 6,800 members all over the world and gets 2,000 unique visitors a day. It gets roughly 6,000 page views each day, as well.
“It has just started to catch on,” Darren Marks said. “It’s amazing how this is all happening and taking off.”
Darren and his wife, Sarah, make sure that all of the proper protections are in place on GromSocial, but the kids, led by Zach, control the creative side of the site as they see fit. GromSocial complies (even exceeds) the Federal Trade Commission’s Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA.) and has received an “A” rating by the Electronic Trust Foundation, which promotes privacy and security in the online community.
Facebook bans users under 13, but some sneaky pre-teens scoot around the security measures in place. GromSocial requires a parental “OK” for account creation, and sends parents emails about their child’s activity.
