The number of people saying "It's the law" as if that has any intrinsic meaning is a little astonishing.
Also, from COPPA: While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of work involved.
So it's not merely a governmental problem. It's a problem with how much work companies are willing to put in to let children access their services.
It isn't a belief. Even if Google obtained parental consent by law it still can't market to children-- since Google's services are a giant marketing engine, it is reasonable for them to disable children's accounts.
COPPA makes compliance tricky, that is why Google (and others) try to avoid it altogether.
There's still no wide agreement on how to properly implement the ‘paternal permission’ provision, and what sort of data would be allowed to be collected, as even the sort of data that is required to run the service such as processing inbound and outbound messages to identify and filter spam for example can get you into a gray area.
Comments
The number of people saying "It's the law" as if that has any intrinsic meaning is a little astonishing.
Also, from COPPA: While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of work involved.
So it's not merely a governmental problem. It's a problem with how much work companies are willing to put in to let children access their services.
It suits Hacker News to believe that the government is causing Google to disable accounts, even though that is not true.
It isn't a belief. Even if Google obtained parental consent by law it still can't market to children-- since Google's services are a giant marketing engine, it is reasonable for them to disable children's accounts.
COPPA makes compliance tricky, that is why Google (and others) try to avoid it altogether.
There's still no wide agreement on how to properly implement the ‘paternal permission’ provision, and what sort of data would be allowed to be collected, as even the sort of data that is required to run the service such as processing inbound and outbound messages to identify and filter spam for example can get you into a gray area.