It is really sad that Google can't figure out a way for those under 13 to have accounts, provided there is a parent signing off on it. And the first comment by someone about how their child can't log onto their Chromebook anymore is particularly disturbing.
"Log onto our website, but only with your parents' permission!" died quickly a decade ago for a reason. There's virtually no way of validating that. Which is why I'm still surprised that movie and video game sites still use the faded "Enter your age to continue" screen.
Losing access to Chromebook is an interesting case. Where did we go so wrong that breaching particular point of AuP causes our own hardware to become inaccessible?
People rally against zealous lockdown of PC (recently restricted boot in EFI, earlier TrustedComputing in general). Not being able to install any software of choice (with reasonably little effort) sure is bad, but having an already functioning computer swept right from under your fingertips could easily be way more damaging. Government couldn't do that without serious due process. Why a company can, and why aren't there voices of stern protest?
FYI, you can still log into a Chromebook with a Anonymous/Incognito/Guest account and use it as long as you don't care about persistence. Chromebooks are designed to be orthogonal to a Google account so changing the accounts that are attached to a given Chromebook is trivial.
Is a parent going to look at untargeted (because of COPPA) gmail.com advertisements while their kid bangs out the odd email? No.
The point of targeted advertising from Google is to show you a relevant ad during the few times that you use their app. With COPPA, all of this goes out the window.
I assure you that even a child is capable of remembering a toy they saw on TV without parental help and, loudly in fact, proclaiming their knowledge as they pass said toy in Target.
To be honest, I think a large part of the blame goes to COPPA. I remember listening on those hearings, and those opposed to COPPA warned against this exact thing happening. They said that taking the decision away from parents would lead to disaster, and guess what, it has.
Rather than blaming Google here, shouldn't we be writing our legislators to repeal COPPA? We should be telling them that this misguided law is starting to intrude onto the choices that parents make when raising their children, and that it should be repealed immediately. As long as COPPA exists, we'll see more and more stories like this.
Had never tried, so I just tried to create an underage account at Yahoo, they handle it thusly:
Please get your mom or dad!
You need your parent or guardian's permission to continue. Show them this screen.
Parents, Please Sign-In.
To complete your child's Yahoo! registration:
Sign in with your own Yahoo! ID or sign up for a new account by clicking on the "Create New Account" button below.
Confirm your child's information on the next page.
You will need a major credit card.
To create a Yahoo! ID for your child, we require your consent to collect, use and disclose certain personal information about him or her. You can give this consent by signing in to Yahoo!, reviewing and editing the information your child provided, and then submitting the form on your child's behalf.
You will be charged 50 cents to help confirm that a parent or guardian more than 18 years old is involved. Yahoo! will donate a portion of that charge to charity.
Your child will be able to use most of Yahoo!'s unmoderated services, including Messenger, Mail, Groups and Message Boards. Learn how to make smart and safer choices online and get advice on using Yahoo! products safely.
Everyone else? Hardly. Facebook doesn't implement it. Twitter doesn't implement it. MSN doesn't. Pretty much all forums out there require you to "verify" that you're older than 13 to post. Google is hardly the only site to judge the consent mechanism exception to be too burdensome and unprofitable to implement.
Microsoft's Live ID absolutely supports this when signing up for, among other things, Hotmail accounts, Messenger accounts, etc. It follows the same basic process as Yahoo, including the $0.50 charge that's partially donated to charity.
Microsoft's implementation has the fun feature that all mail to the "kid" needs to be approved by he parent. Very fun if a college student puts in the wrong age which triggers those notices to go to the admin account for he college. You need to call customer support to fix this. This was not a fun call.
OK, to be more specific: everybody else has implemented some way for kids under 13 to use their service. That Google does this with the same heavyhanded approach they use for everything else having to do with meatspace is just ... hell, I don't know. Lazy? Short-sighted? Klutzy? Ridiculous?
Actually, in many states parents CAN give consent for their children to have alcohol.
For example, section 4301.69 of the Ohio Revised Code states
"Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, no person shall sell beer or intoxicating liquor to an underage person...unless the underage person is supervised by a parent, ..." (Quote abbreviated for brevity, but the elided portion doesn't change the meaning)
Which is kind of ironic, given that 18 seems to be the world-wide consensus for being of legal age [1] and drinking age [2]. But your point stands, of course: No overruling of that fact by a parent or - god forbid - the 18 year old that should be protected.
No attack against you or your values (if you even share those represented by the laws), but - yeah - I wanted to rub in the fact that this is kind of anti-liberal. And - maybe the basis that supports laws like that is to blame for COPPA as well?
COPPA seems ridiculous and naive. Its harder for a kid to access GMail/Facebook than a porn site! I don't think Google is not to blame here. They should have sent a warning to the daughter's email address atleast. Tomorrow all someone needs to kill my account is to crack into it, and change my date or birth -- and let Google do the rest.
None, as long as you don't piss off a prosecutor somewhere who wants to punish you for being a bad person. The problem here is it makes it possible for someone to say "show me the man and I'll find you the crime."
This is why you should take control of your own data, and not let your data in the hands of a company.
Buy your own email address, set up your own blog self hosted.
Calendar: A moleskine. Based on the amount of times I haven't had access to "the cloud" or my phone is DOA (less of an issue now I've downgraded to a Nokia 6303), this has saved my ass over and over.
Contact management: My phone SIM in my Nokia 6303.
Unfortunately, that's easier said than done for people who can't afford hosting fees or who don't understand how everything works and would not know where to start working on something like that. People go to the free services because they're free of charge and often far easier to set up than rolling your own.
I propose the term "RMS solution" for this sort of thing: it's a lot of bother, but I'm glad that somebody is keeping it a viable option, just in case.
Hard to believe the ad wasn't titled "Dear Sophie's Account Held by Myself, Her Father, Not to be Handed Over to Sophie until such time as she meets Google's User Age Threshold for Regulatory Compliance."
"Dear Sophie" does have a much nicer ring to it, I guess.
"Dear Sophie" pretty clearly implies it isn't Sophie's account to me. When you write an letter (especially one that hasn't been sent yet as the commercial implies), you are the owner of the letter, right? To cite the Bible, it is Paul's letters to the Corinthians, not the Corinthians' letters from Paul.
Leaving aside my glee that we must reach into mythology (edited, thanks rubidium) to help Google's case, any letter that begins "Dear Sophie" sounds like it's a letter... to Sophie. And while she might not be able to read it right now, my initial guess as to why would be that infants don't have great reading comprehension, not that Google can't find an algorithm to get around COPPA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age. It would be iron age. And no historian disputes that an actual letter was written to Corinthians (and most are certain on Paul), so that takes out the mythology. At best, you can call it "Iron Age history of uncertain veracity". Sorry that it doesn't have quite the same demeaning effect.
Not sure what the age of the reference has to do with anything, but ok, here is a modern one. I write a poem, and send it to my girlfriend via email. Who is the author of the poem? I really don't get how intended recipient = account owner.
But the commercial isn't about sending emails to your daughter. The account is all emails sent to itself, which the father someday intends to log in and show to his daughter. It is the digital equivalent of keeping a scrapbook. The father creates the scrapbook about his daughter, and then shows it to her. I fail to see anyway this can be seen anything but the father's account.
> But the commercial isn't about sending emails to your daughter
That's very true, as I don't have a daughter. It's about one man sending emails to his daughter.
And the way I know that is it's called "Dear Sophie" and then the dude makes clear Sophie is his daughter. And the script, as written, has the narrator talking and writing to her, and not himself (which would have been less touching, if apparently more legally accurate).
Whatever happend to "If you are under 18 (or 13?), ask your parents or gaurdian for permission"?
Believe that's the current Dutch regulations, not an expert though. It's quite unfair to assume that companies will keep track of this. Kids under 13 should probably have parental/monitored internet usage anyway.
(Though I have to admit to having had a Fb account back when it was 18+ when I was 17. School wasn't on Fb and everyone did it...)
It's a US company so they have to obey COPPA, which requires verifiable consent from a parent before collecting any private information from the child and restricts marketing to that child. So, in practical terms, for Google to offer mail accounts to children under 13, they need to be able to collect faxed or mailed proof of consent from parents, have some system to process that information and tie it to the accounts, then they need special rules for the ads shown on the gmail site to that user.
I assume you mean "COPPA-compliant account providers that allow children under 13". If so, scroll up in the thread - they all require either faxing, mailing, or credit card payments.
I'd suggest a Fastmail.fm account instead. Their TOS says:
This Service is provided to individuals who are at least 18
years old or minors who have parental permission to open
and maintain an account.
I think I read somewhere that they consider a charge on a parent's credit card to be explicit parental consent. Makes sense to me.
Also, since you are paying them a little money, they offer actual technical support, unlike Google.
They also have family accounts, where you can have one person take care of billing and administration of several accounts. That's what I use for my whole family, including my parents.
B-b-but Google made this fancy video advertisement about how I can give my infant daughter a Gmail account and write to her as she grows up! Does it only work if she never uses it? You've gotta wait until you can hold a bat mitzvah to hand it off to her?
This kind of chicanery is why I can only chuckle when Google announces new initiatives that require significant customer service, like selling telephones or providing a fulfillment system to compete with Amazon Prime. They treat their users like ants. And given the way their business is structured, that scale is about correct.
Google doesn't need for any given user of their service to be pleased. They're a whale, straining krill from the ocean, playing a vast advertising numbers game on a scale individuals can barely grasp, and can barely factor into.
Which is not an illegitimate position. But it poses a problem for individuals who are swept into its gaping maw - there is zero incentive machinery to compel Google to ever get things corrected. Depending on where a product is on its growth curve, it might even cost Google more to fix the problem than to replace the users. Your only recourse is to hope for enough public embarrassment to short-circuit the system.
It also calls into question the viability of their entry into any business where service is a differentiating characteristic.
That is not entirely fair, automation is the only way to admin millions of users and when nonsensical factors like COPPA get introduced to the system this happens. And I don't think that they did anything wrong here considering the consequences of not complying with the law.
The fact that it makes Google look bad doesn't impact its fairness. I acknowledged that that's not an illegitimate way to run the business.
But that doesn't really matter to a little girl whose correspondence with loved ones has disappeared down a black hole. That despair is as reasonable as Google's indifference. And, it points to a great opportunity to make a reliable mail service that addresses the needs of the ever-growing population of young people who will need email long before it is regulatorily convenient to Google.
Disney manages to provide good customer service for the millions of real-life humans that walk its theme parks annually. Google's problem is not that it can't be done, but that it's unprofitable to provide customer service when your business model consists of making a few pennies here and there.
I'm addressing the claim that automation is the only way to service millions of users. Whether people cry despite having the ability to receive personalized service is orthogonal to the point.
If Google charged hundreds of dollars for each user they could surely afford a bubbly teenager to provide personalized service too. They're completely separate businesses and models, there is no comparing the two.
Amazon has quite an awesome service actually for the few times I had to deal with them. They also have quite a few users. Oh, but right, those are actually customers paying for what they get. I guess Google support is what you get for using a free service after all.
This is absurd. Instead of not collecting data for children Google is blocking access to children. I am seriously looking for alternatives to Gmail. Any suggestions? I don't want my email account hooked up to a social network and advertising machinery.
It's a bit more complex than that. In order to comply, Google would need to verify that you are a parent/guardian and that you are giving permission for your child to join. Faxing of identity documents would likely be involved.
Google's approach is heavy handed, but it's a really bad law.
It seems like a very straightforward solution to me.
If an account is created for a person under-age, suspend ad service to that account (end data collection) and require a nominal fee to activate it (which provides abundant evidence of parental consent). Cutting off the next generation from email does not seem like the answer. Would a Montessori-educated, eight-year-old Sergey Brin have appreciated such treatment?
Since that won't happen, I mean, when we have kids I guess we just have to pay for hosting and administer their email ourselves?
So then everyone who doesn't want data collection or ads, but wants to use google just applies for an under 13 account.
Google products are free, they make money on data collection/advertisements. People who they can't advertise to aren't profitable, and it's unlikely a nominal fee would make up for all the overhead. The user is their product not their customer.
So you limit it to 500 MB of storage and show blanket Club Penguin ads instead of targeted ones. Whatever. It's a completely solvable problem. And it's fine if Google doesn't want to solve it. They should just let their ad agency know.
I don't think so, its just that you'd have to obtain parental consent 100% of the time. Data gathering is baked into providing an email service, that part of COPPA seems logical enough to me. The issue of targeted ads vs untargeted ads vs no ads doesn't appear to have anything to do with anything, other than what you'd notify the parents you are doing, and what you are asking their consent of.
Its very easy, simply jump onto Amazon's ec2 free instance and setup a webserver/webmail vm
it will cost you very little and you will not have to deal with crap like that, alternatively you can have a chat to your friendly domain hosting company, I am sure they will have something that will fit your needs.
This has been covered on HN before, the solution is pretty simple: just use a (free) Google Apps account instead and create accounts for your children. You will be responsible for complying with COPPA yourself instead of Google.
All you need is a domain name, but it's a good idea to have that anyways in case you ever want to leave. I use this solution with my kids and it works great because it also allows me to control access to certain services and reset passwords for them, etc.
But since Google can't collect data to target ad to the children, Google doesn't make any money from them. Google don't need children that can't pay money. Case closed.
their time as innovative and useful is coming to a halt. they have nearly zero incentive any more to improve, even in their core products. search results everyday become more and more polluted with seo spam. google maps hasn't changed in years, still the same blocky loading and no useful overlays like demographic data built right in.
It may feel like the Googles and the Facebooks are self-sustaining juggernauts, but customer happiness and retention is exactly the incentive machinery you are missing.
Everyone plays the balance game. You can have the best customer service in the world, but my daughter is still going to cry if your moving company breaks her stuff, or your store sells us tainted dog food, or your family-run email service writes the wrong data to the backup tapes just before a failure. Amazon might be awesome in terms of rates of well handled customers, but Google is doing pretty well, maw metaphors notwithstanding.
edit: it's really the rates of bad experiences/customer I'm talking about. There's another side of things, that of, bad experiences/customer with a problem, which Amazon is better at (in a market that isn't really comparable to the one in which google's services primarily reside, of course). On the other hand, Bezos's often cited goal of every call that has to be made to customer service being a bug to be fixed is exactly google's goal, it just sounds a lot better when there's still a number you could call.
It may feel like the Googles and the Facebooks are self-sustaining juggernauts, but customer happiness and retention is exactly the incentive machinery you are missing.
It really doesn't. Advertisers have committed budgets and have switching costs that are often much, much higher than those of end users. It would take a sustained, double-digit-percentage loss of users to impact Google's bottom line.
One user fucked over out of 1,000, even if they never return, is pretty easy to paper over. Which is why there's no phone number a user can call if they're in trouble. They don't really matter, so it's not worth the cost to address their issue.
AdWords advertisers, on the other hand, they can get a human on the phone whenever they want. Because if they have an issue, it's honest-to-god cash money that stops flowing into Google's coffers.
You can substitute "user", but as william42 pointed out, the distinction means little. Feel free to bring up to anyone here relying on VC that their users aren't their customers, and be amazed once again at how little insight that provides.
If you want to contribute some signal instead of noise, you could say they have two sets of customers with sometimes opposed motivations. But that isn't uncommon (and if it isn't another set of customers, it's your suppliers or the hours in the day or something else). As I said, everyone plays the balance game.
Concur: To lose a customer is to lose some chunk of revenue. To lose a user is to lose some chunk of page views to be sold. A very important distinction. You can offset shed users by adjusting the product to generate more page views, as publishers well know. Lose too many customers, though, and that's a lot of money that's simply not hitting your pocket anymore.
With that in mind, I'm pretty sure Netflix would not email me asking to know about the quality of a given streamed movie if I were merely a user.
And the way I know that is that YouTube has never once checked in on me to see how my streaming experience went.
if you wrote out your first paragraph in an actual formula, you would realize what you're missing here. You can't always generate more page views, so gaining or retaining users would then become what you want to maximize (as publishers wish they could). Lose advertisers, get more users or make the ads more effective and earn more. Make a product that users and advertisers like, and you maybe get more of both. Finding the sweet spot remains hard. Ignoring these dynamics is not helpful.
Your point about adwords customers getting someone on the phone is important, because not all adwords customers can. Preferential treatment for large customers is not at all unusual, and I don't think anyone would argue that it is bad. They just want a phone number they can call too.
Netflix and Youtube have completely different streaming models (namely youtube's is not adaptive), but I do see a "report a bug" link on there. But this ignores my point, which was not that google customer service is awesome, just that there definitely is a feedback loop ("there is zero incentive machinery"), and that "product not a customer" still misses the point as much as it ever has.
I disagree with it. If I am conducting a free for all art exhibition (no selling of arts, just for people to see), then the visitors are not my customers. They are just viewers. I could have advertisers or sponsors for that program and someone could even be paying me based on the number of visitors. That does not make the visitors my customers.
On a side note- even if I lose my staff, I lose some chunk or revenue, that does not make my staff my customer.
It's such an attractive meme, isn't it? Short, straight to the point, and it seems to make sense. What could possibly be wrong?
Like most things, the explanation why it is wrong is subtle, and much longer than the seven words it takes to express.
But think about this: credit card machines are usually provided free to merchants. Merchants aren't the product, and the credit card companies certainly regard them as a customer...
Multi-sided markets[1] are much more common in real life than you'd think, and the subject of significant study[2]
"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." is the correct sentence [1], also you are welcome to explain why it's wrong according to you, but imho you are mistaken.
I got the quote from [1]. You may well be correct about the original version - I was trying to make it as short and clear as possible. I'm not sure it matters too much, though.
Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!").
This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!").
Look how much business they are doing! How much quick to process it is compared to cash!
You are right of course - most mass market ads focus on the consumers, not the merchants. BUT the merchants are customers too, and it is the consumers that credit cards attractive to merchants. Classic multi-sided market.
This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
This is a common case of "If you are not paying for it, you are the product being sold.", this is what happens when you engage in careless computing and put your data on a third party remote server under their control.
Don't be careless and it won't come back and bite you.
On the contrary, plenty of companies handle this just fine. COPPA does not require Google to disable or delete the account. Legally, they only need to get the guardian's permission. This is much more trouble than is required by COPPA.
No. Actually it requires "verifiable parental consent" meaning you have to be able to prove later you had such consent. This means having them fax a form that you retain, or get a digitally signed email, or the like. This is not trivial to comply with.
Google's services and google data collection are two sides of the same coin. Make it possible to have google services without the data collection part would expose the actual data collection taking place and worse users could start asking to be disconnected from the data collection since it's now possible.
I bet the biggest thing holding Google back is that many will say they're under 13 just to take advantage of the ad restrictions and privacy protections placed on those accounts.
they've chosen to act apparently without ever considering how their actions might affect the people who use and rely on their services.
Hyperbolic nonsense. Their consideration for multicultural, international, legal, technical, practical, and end user issues under time and effort constraints doesn't come out exactly the way you wanted it to under one edge case that you happen to hit therefore they "haven't ever considered"?
Never assign to malice what can be adequately be explained by stupidity needs a corollorary - never assign to malice or stupidity what can adequately be explained by being outside the normal patterns of a huge system.
Can you expand a bit on how a sentient human being, wishing to communicate with other sentient human beings, is outside the normal patterns of a communications system?
Google isn't just a communication system, though. They're a very large corporation involved in numerous enterprises that often interfere with one another, and their actions are further modified by an even larger legal system that only imperfectly represents the collective will of its constituents.
Decisions are often (indeed, perhaps mostly) made without any consideration of individual people (even the people making the decisions aren't always entirely conscious of what they're doing). I don't believe that's a necessity, but a lot of people are pretty comfortable with it and it mostly approximates working. This sort of thing shouldn't come as a terrible surprise.
> Google isn't just a communication system, though.
Gmail is. It's not positioned with anything like the complexity you describe. So it's not unreasonable, as OP suggested it was, for a user to want to use it, without giving much thought to age.
> It's not positioned with anything like the complexity you describe.
I'm afraid that this is, at least to the best of my ability to judge, simply wrong. Gmail is affected by the rules of operation at Google, and by the law. They certainly could address the issue with more compassion, but only at the cost of further increasing the complexity of their system. Everything is a trade-off.
> So it's not unreasonable, as OP suggested it was, for a user to want to use it, without giving much thought to age.
I didn't say it was "unreasonable." Just that the system isn't set up to allow it. It could be, but it currently isn't.
Oh, I meant marketing positioning. That is, Google doesn't tell users holy crap this is a byzantine system of laws and mousetraps and shit!
They just say Gmail is neat, and it's free, so use it.
But, of course you're right, the creation of the sausage that is Gmail is a very complicated sequence, beset by both internal and external bureaucracy, to say nothing of the technical challenges in maintaining it.
Certainly. I would never accuse Google of consistency in presentation. Consistency is usually very far down the list of things-that-matter when it comes to business; I suspect they're much more motivated by convincing people to use their products.
If they weren't, we would all be complaining about some other company running one of the world's most popular email services instead.
So - when was the last time everyone reading this backed up their gmail?
Take the next 5 minutes to install thunderbird (you'll be impressed if you have not seen it in years) and enter the IMAP settings for google and download everything in the background while you work.
When your account gets hacked and you lose everything, you'll appreciate the backup.
If you have additional services (e.g., Google Docs or Flickr) and are willing to trust someone else with your data, I highly recommend backupify. I set it up for my gapps account and my personal stuff. Pretty easy to set up. And then you can just export all your data at once.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do know the backupify team, but I pay for the product because I find it useful.
For the record Thunderbird's IMAP sync is not a reliable backup mechanism by itself. If many emails are deleted from your account, Thunderbird will sync (and delete your files locally) before you have the opportunity to copy them off somewhere safe. I know this from deleting all my mails off my gmail account (to make an encrypted archive) and trying to use TB as a reliable storage method -- since I had just taken a backup of my TB directory I didn't lose any mail, but it should be emphasized that TB with IMAP sync is not a backup mechanism.
However, there are some great TB extensions that will allow you to export your mail into a reasonable, portable format every so often. I use ImportExportTools to export my mailbox to an mbox file and store that file securely. I can use this file to reimport to Thunderbird or any other mail client, or even to read some mail directly. :)
The only useful advice I got out of IRC was to stay in offline mode until I had copied over to a "local folder". They didn't say anything about a configuration option that would allow me to avoid the sync/deletion.
Of course, this was in Feb 2011. Maybe things have changed now.
I felt the same way. Turns out there was a story in July with an almost identical title, but they seem to be different occurrences. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2725983
The primary purpose of online child-protection laws is to make their supporters look and feel like concerned citizens who protect children. Their efficacy at actually protecting children from anything is laughable.
A pretty bad story - not that I'm surprised though. Google have never been good at customer service (obviously with the web so large and most of Google being free, you can't expect much, but what is 'offered' is usually sub-par, even for paid products).
On the plus side, this is #1 on Hacker News meaning Matt Cutts should reply any second and internally flag this up inside Google.
One of the comments on the Google+ entry also stuck out:
"The same happened to me. It also means my daughter can't log into her Chromebook!"
If that's true that's pretty awful. It does bring up a good point though - if Google close your account (rightly or wrongly), it does make owning a Chromebook somewhat useless.
COPPA is pretty far afield from my area of expertise. I'm more than happy to encourage people back at the plex to talk about the situation with COPPA and our services though.
I'm a bit disheartened to see that everyone is buying the COPPA bullshit. Yes, COPPA is the law that applies, and has some restrictions. But that doesn't force Google to act like a total dick about it!
Lets assume there's an automated process for detecting underage accounts. Why can't they just prevent the account from being used to send email? Or why can't they say "Sorry, we have to disable your account; but you can download all of your emails at (insert some secure link to a ZIP file)"?? Or, as the post says, migrate these accounts to their COPPA-compliant set of accounts?
You know what the real problem is? The real problem is that Google collects a shit-load of data about its users. And they don't want to put in filters which will not log the data of underage children, because that opens them up to scrutiny. So they would rather keep this blackbox closed, and in the process if a few kids get screwed, then, well, screw 'em!
> Lets assume there's an automated process for detecting underage accounts. Why can't they just prevent the account from being used to send email?
Any data collection is forbidden by COPPA without parental verification. You seem to think that's just logging ad targeting data or something. No, it includes any information entered by the child into the service. So not only can they not send any email, they can't receive e-mail. They can't even have an email address! They can't thumbs up a video on youtube, let alone save one as a favorite video for later. You could only view google docs that are globally-viewable, since you can't share a private document with a child without storing some data about them. They certainly can't edit a document!
everything you mentioned seems to me to be ad targeting data, email, email address, thumbs up, save as fav even viewing a global google docs all this is part of data collected as part of the profiling process in order to do ad targeting.
Actually I don't think there is a single you do once logged on (or registered) that is not collected to profile you. facebook even collects what you do when logged off.
I never can quite buy in to fuss like this. They are just a company, and I am not surprised nor do I get upset when I get caught in a cog. Knowing that it can happen, I prepare.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadPeople rally against zealous lockdown of PC (recently restricted boot in EFI, earlier TrustedComputing in general). Not being able to install any software of choice (with reasonably little effort) sure is bad, but having an already functioning computer swept right from under your fingertips could easily be way more damaging. Government couldn't do that without serious due process. Why a company can, and why aren't there voices of stern protest?
That's nonsense - look at the hours of merchandise promotion across dozens of channels. Toys is billions of dollars per year.
Is a parent going to look at untargeted (because of COPPA) gmail.com advertisements while their kid bangs out the odd email? No.
The point of targeted advertising from Google is to show you a relevant ad during the few times that you use their app. With COPPA, all of this goes out the window.
Rather than blaming Google here, shouldn't we be writing our legislators to repeal COPPA? We should be telling them that this misguided law is starting to intrude onto the choices that parents make when raising their children, and that it should be repealed immediately. As long as COPPA exists, we'll see more and more stories like this.
"Hey Mr Food-N-Liquor owner, I give you consent for you to sell my 18 year old alcohol" etc
Please get your mom or dad! You need your parent or guardian's permission to continue. Show them this screen. Parents, Please Sign-In.
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If the internet had existed when I was a little tike, I'd have been 13 for about eight years.
For example, section 4301.69 of the Ohio Revised Code states "Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, no person shall sell beer or intoxicating liquor to an underage person...unless the underage person is supervised by a parent, ..." (Quote abbreviated for brevity, but the elided portion doesn't change the meaning)
No attack against you or your values (if you even share those represented by the laws), but - yeah - I wanted to rub in the fact that this is kind of anti-liberal. And - maybe the basis that supports laws like that is to blame for COPPA as well?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_age#Countries_and_subdiv...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_age
There are 13 year old kids out there who can write a web and mail server, yet could get into trouble for using them.
Not a good position to be in, honestly....
Calendar: A moleskine. Based on the amount of times I haven't had access to "the cloud" or my phone is DOA (less of an issue now I've downgraded to a Nokia 6303), this has saved my ass over and over.
Contact management: My phone SIM in my Nokia 6303.
Running your own shouldn't be that complicated, but it won't become easy until enough people start switching.
Only to have it all deleted when Google get around to it?
TL;DR: The account in the commercial is the parent's, not the kid's.
"Dear Sophie" does have a much nicer ring to it, I guess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age. It would be iron age. And no historian disputes that an actual letter was written to Corinthians (and most are certain on Paul), so that takes out the mythology. At best, you can call it "Iron Age history of uncertain veracity". Sorry that it doesn't have quite the same demeaning effect.
You can't send an email to someone who doesn't own an email account.
That's very true, as I don't have a daughter. It's about one man sending emails to his daughter.
And the way I know that is it's called "Dear Sophie" and then the dude makes clear Sophie is his daughter. And the script, as written, has the narrator talking and writing to her, and not himself (which would have been less touching, if apparently more legally accurate).
Believe that's the current Dutch regulations, not an expert though. It's quite unfair to assume that companies will keep track of this. Kids under 13 should probably have parental/monitored internet usage anyway.
(Though I have to admit to having had a Fb account back when it was 18+ when I was 17. School wasn't on Fb and everyone did it...)
Also, since you are paying them a little money, they offer actual technical support, unlike Google.
They also have family accounts, where you can have one person take care of billing and administration of several accounts. That's what I use for my whole family, including my parents.
This kind of chicanery is why I can only chuckle when Google announces new initiatives that require significant customer service, like selling telephones or providing a fulfillment system to compete with Amazon Prime. They treat their users like ants. And given the way their business is structured, that scale is about correct.
Google doesn't need for any given user of their service to be pleased. They're a whale, straining krill from the ocean, playing a vast advertising numbers game on a scale individuals can barely grasp, and can barely factor into.
Which is not an illegitimate position. But it poses a problem for individuals who are swept into its gaping maw - there is zero incentive machinery to compel Google to ever get things corrected. Depending on where a product is on its growth curve, it might even cost Google more to fix the problem than to replace the users. Your only recourse is to hope for enough public embarrassment to short-circuit the system.
It also calls into question the viability of their entry into any business where service is a differentiating characteristic.
But that doesn't really matter to a little girl whose correspondence with loved ones has disappeared down a black hole. That despair is as reasonable as Google's indifference. And, it points to a great opportunity to make a reliable mail service that addresses the needs of the ever-growing population of young people who will need email long before it is regulatorily convenient to Google.
> They provide COPPA compliant email accounts for children under 13 from their Apps for Education domains.
The capability is obviously there, and apparently COPPA has a way for parents to provide consent.
Android...... Where does it say anywhere that Android devices can only be sold to those old enough not to be covered by COPPA?
Google's approach is heavy handed, but it's a really bad law.
If an account is created for a person under-age, suspend ad service to that account (end data collection) and require a nominal fee to activate it (which provides abundant evidence of parental consent). Cutting off the next generation from email does not seem like the answer. Would a Montessori-educated, eight-year-old Sergey Brin have appreciated such treatment?
Since that won't happen, I mean, when we have kids I guess we just have to pay for hosting and administer their email ourselves?
Google products are free, they make money on data collection/advertisements. People who they can't advertise to aren't profitable, and it's unlikely a nominal fee would make up for all the overhead. The user is their product not their customer.
OK I concede that one, and it made me laugh.
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus45-how-comply-childrens...
it will cost you very little and you will not have to deal with crap like that, alternatively you can have a chat to your friendly domain hosting company, I am sure they will have something that will fit your needs.
All you need is a domain name, but it's a good idea to have that anyways in case you ever want to leave. I use this solution with my kids and it works great because it also allows me to control access to certain services and reset passwords for them, etc.
Want your email free, just do it the internet way: host your own.
MapsGL. http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
Everyone plays the balance game. You can have the best customer service in the world, but my daughter is still going to cry if your moving company breaks her stuff, or your store sells us tainted dog food, or your family-run email service writes the wrong data to the backup tapes just before a failure. Amazon might be awesome in terms of rates of well handled customers, but Google is doing pretty well, maw metaphors notwithstanding.
edit: it's really the rates of bad experiences/customer I'm talking about. There's another side of things, that of, bad experiences/customer with a problem, which Amazon is better at (in a market that isn't really comparable to the one in which google's services primarily reside, of course). On the other hand, Bezos's often cited goal of every call that has to be made to customer service being a bug to be fixed is exactly google's goal, it just sounds a lot better when there's still a number you could call.
Except we're not their customers.
One user fucked over out of 1,000, even if they never return, is pretty easy to paper over. Which is why there's no phone number a user can call if they're in trouble. They don't really matter, so it's not worth the cost to address their issue.
AdWords advertisers, on the other hand, they can get a human on the phone whenever they want. Because if they have an issue, it's honest-to-god cash money that stops flowing into Google's coffers.
They're the real customers.
If you want to contribute some signal instead of noise, you could say they have two sets of customers with sometimes opposed motivations. But that isn't uncommon (and if it isn't another set of customers, it's your suppliers or the hours in the day or something else). As I said, everyone plays the balance game.
To Google and Facebook, users are just parameters to be optimized.
With that in mind, I'm pretty sure Netflix would not email me asking to know about the quality of a given streamed movie if I were merely a user.
And the way I know that is that YouTube has never once checked in on me to see how my streaming experience went.
Your point about adwords customers getting someone on the phone is important, because not all adwords customers can. Preferential treatment for large customers is not at all unusual, and I don't think anyone would argue that it is bad. They just want a phone number they can call too.
Netflix and Youtube have completely different streaming models (namely youtube's is not adaptive), but I do see a "report a bug" link on there. But this ignores my point, which was not that google customer service is awesome, just that there definitely is a feedback loop ("there is zero incentive machinery"), and that "product not a customer" still misses the point as much as it ever has.
On a side note- even if I lose my staff, I lose some chunk or revenue, that does not make my staff my customer.
However, you write "to be optimized", so clearly you agree with my original comment. Catchphrase away, then.
It's such an attractive meme, isn't it? Short, straight to the point, and it seems to make sense. What could possibly be wrong?
Like most things, the explanation why it is wrong is subtle, and much longer than the seven words it takes to express.
But think about this: credit card machines are usually provided free to merchants. Merchants aren't the product, and the credit card companies certainly regard them as a customer...
Multi-sided markets[1] are much more common in real life than you'd think, and the subject of significant study[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market
[2] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=multi+sided+market...
[1] http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#325604...
I got the quote from [1]. You may well be correct about the original version - I was trying to make it as short and clear as possible. I'm not sure it matters too much, though.
[1] http://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/facebook-youre-not-the-c...
Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!").
This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
Look again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OolP9gNLP6c
Look how much business they are doing! How much quick to process it is compared to cash!
You are right of course - most mass market ads focus on the consumers, not the merchants. BUT the merchants are customers too, and it is the consumers that credit cards attractive to merchants. Classic multi-sided market.
This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
I'm glad it is being noticed.
Don't be careless and it won't come back and bite you.
And set her up with her own website already. Show her the power she has to not put up with such stupid limitations.
2. Google are completely within their rights to do this. It's their servers after all.
2. That's why I said "Set her up with her own website already". Notice I didn't blame Google.
TANSTAAFL, you're paying for their services by acting as their product.
Hyperbolic nonsense. Their consideration for multicultural, international, legal, technical, practical, and end user issues under time and effort constraints doesn't come out exactly the way you wanted it to under one edge case that you happen to hit therefore they "haven't ever considered"?
Never assign to malice what can be adequately be explained by stupidity needs a corollorary - never assign to malice or stupidity what can adequately be explained by being outside the normal patterns of a huge system.
Can you expand a bit on how a sentient human being, wishing to communicate with other sentient human beings, is outside the normal patterns of a communications system?
Decisions are often (indeed, perhaps mostly) made without any consideration of individual people (even the people making the decisions aren't always entirely conscious of what they're doing). I don't believe that's a necessity, but a lot of people are pretty comfortable with it and it mostly approximates working. This sort of thing shouldn't come as a terrible surprise.
Gmail is. It's not positioned with anything like the complexity you describe. So it's not unreasonable, as OP suggested it was, for a user to want to use it, without giving much thought to age.
I'm afraid that this is, at least to the best of my ability to judge, simply wrong. Gmail is affected by the rules of operation at Google, and by the law. They certainly could address the issue with more compassion, but only at the cost of further increasing the complexity of their system. Everything is a trade-off.
> So it's not unreasonable, as OP suggested it was, for a user to want to use it, without giving much thought to age.
I didn't say it was "unreasonable." Just that the system isn't set up to allow it. It could be, but it currently isn't.
They just say Gmail is neat, and it's free, so use it.
But, of course you're right, the creation of the sausage that is Gmail is a very complicated sequence, beset by both internal and external bureaucracy, to say nothing of the technical challenges in maintaining it.
If they weren't, we would all be complaining about some other company running one of the world's most popular email services instead.
This is why. They just don't get it.
Take the next 5 minutes to install thunderbird (you'll be impressed if you have not seen it in years) and enter the IMAP settings for google and download everything in the background while you work.
When your account gets hacked and you lose everything, you'll appreciate the backup.
and be able to backup your imap mailboxes without a GUI
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-get...
If anybody else tries this, I'd recommend sticking with POP3 as getmail's IMAP client seems to mark all your messages as read (not cool).
In the interest of full disclosure, I do know the backupify team, but I pay for the product because I find it useful.
However, there are some great TB extensions that will allow you to export your mail into a reasonable, portable format every so often. I use ImportExportTools to export my mailbox to an mbox file and store that file securely. I can use this file to reimport to Thunderbird or any other mail client, or even to read some mail directly. :)
Of course, this was in Feb 2011. Maybe things have changed now.
Of course, our kids can still find p0rn, violence and who-knows-what-else online with no filtering whatsoever. But at least they can't blog about it.
On the plus side, this is #1 on Hacker News meaning Matt Cutts should reply any second and internally flag this up inside Google.
One of the comments on the Google+ entry also stuck out:
"The same happened to me. It also means my daughter can't log into her Chromebook!"
If that's true that's pretty awful. It does bring up a good point though - if Google close your account (rightly or wrongly), it does make owning a Chromebook somewhat useless.
Lets assume there's an automated process for detecting underage accounts. Why can't they just prevent the account from being used to send email? Or why can't they say "Sorry, we have to disable your account; but you can download all of your emails at (insert some secure link to a ZIP file)"?? Or, as the post says, migrate these accounts to their COPPA-compliant set of accounts?
You know what the real problem is? The real problem is that Google collects a shit-load of data about its users. And they don't want to put in filters which will not log the data of underage children, because that opens them up to scrutiny. So they would rather keep this blackbox closed, and in the process if a few kids get screwed, then, well, screw 'em!
Any data collection is forbidden by COPPA without parental verification. You seem to think that's just logging ad targeting data or something. No, it includes any information entered by the child into the service. So not only can they not send any email, they can't receive e-mail. They can't even have an email address! They can't thumbs up a video on youtube, let alone save one as a favorite video for later. You could only view google docs that are globally-viewable, since you can't share a private document with a child without storing some data about them. They certainly can't edit a document!
It goes on and on.
Actually I don't think there is a single you do once logged on (or registered) that is not collected to profile you. facebook even collects what you do when logged off.
As they say, "Luck favors the prepared".