A bit late to the party but wasn't this exact text posted somewhere else at least 6 months back? If not more. I am 100% sure I read something like this with the exact same title before. On topic: What on earth does a child really need Gmail or anything for anyway? I would like my future children to learn about technology and be interested in how things work but on the other hand giving a 8 year old a cellphone or something seems ridiculous.
Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
141–150 of 199 posts
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#142Good 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.
1. Others have referenced the law involved.
2. That's why I said "Set her up with her own website already". Notice I didn't blame Google.
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What we need is for big, well funded companies to somehow use their influence to get bad laws changed...
But the only thing in politics more powerful than corporate money is "For the children!!!"...
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#144B-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…
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.
Indoor maps? Not to mention this whole Google Maps on your phone thing (and navigation on your Android phone)...
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The distinction is very important: a customer is someone who pays you money. To Google and Facebook, users are just parameters to be optimized.
only at a completely shortsighted first approximation. Any policy they have regarding advertisers are parameters to optimize revenue as well.
However, you write "to be optimized", so clearly you agree with my original comment. Catchphrase away, then.
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
IIRC, Sophie is old enough to read in at least part of the ad (though perhaps I expect kids to learn to read on the earlier side).
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#147So - 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.
or install something like https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync and be able to backup your imap mailboxes without a GUI
I use http://offlineimap.org/
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The distinction is very important: a customer is someone who pays you money. To Google and Facebook, users are just parameters to be optimized.
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 e…
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.
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#149There is an interesting rule in COPPA that is the cause of this bad experience: http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.shtm#teen For sites that choose to age-screen, age information should be asked in a way that does not invite falsification. See Question 39, below. In addition, we recommend that sites that choose to age-screen employ temporary or permanent cookies to prevent children from back-buttoning to change thei…
This is the important bit that people miss. Google isn't allowed to warn you that changing your age will apply restrictions to your account, and they aren't allowed to let you easily undo it after it's done. This is what happens when Congress dictates user interfaces.
Re: Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? That's nonsense - look at the hours of merchandise promotion across dozens of channels. Toys is billions of dollars per year.
If the parents are watching TV with them yes. 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.
The TV ads are not there for the parents to see, they're there for the kids to see.