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Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

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Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#111

Post by lps24 »

dotBen wrote: post #39
1010011010 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COPPA is fucking stupid legislation, but Google should at least provide a "parental consent" mechanism.

A parent can't 'over-rule' a federal law. "Hey Mr Food-N-Liquor owner, I give you consent for you to sell my 18 year old alcohol" etc

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)

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#112

Post by dillona »

sp332 wrote: post #105
ctdonath wrote: post #22

Good life lesson for the kid about government, and why freedom & liberty are so important. And set her up with her own website already. Show her the power she has to not put up with such stupid limitations.

1. This has nothing to do with the government. 2. Google are completely within their rights to do this. It's their servers after all.

The reason this happened is a rather obnoxious law called Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#113

Post by sp332 »

dillona wrote: post #112
sp332 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. This has nothing to do with the government. 2. Google are completely within their rights to do this. It's their servers after all.

The reason this happened is a rather obnoxious law called Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)

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.

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#115

Post by joemoon »

yanw wrote: post #41
danilocampos wrote: post #18

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 providin…

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.

From the post:

> 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.

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#116

Post by magicalist »

danilocampos wrote: post #18

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 providin…

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.

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#118

Post by joebadmo »

Google is less flexible and less responsive on this and similar issues than they could or should be.

But. This discussion should be about COPPA. See danah boyd's illuminating research and analysis on the subject here:

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/11/01/parents...

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#119

Post by justinhj »

biot wrote: post #97
yanw wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Disney also does the same with tens of millions of online kids with Club Penguin

Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

#120

Post by darklajid »

dotBen wrote: post #39
1010011010 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COPPA is fucking stupid legislation, but Google should at least provide a "parental consent" mechanism.

A parent can't 'over-rule' a federal law. "Hey Mr Food-N-Liquor owner, I give you consent for you to sell my 18 year old alcohol" etc

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?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_age#Countries_and_subdiv...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_age

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