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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.
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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.
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COPPA explicitly provides for a parental consent mechanism; Google simply doesn't choose to implement it. Everybody else implements it just fine.
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.
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 ca…
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.
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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…
Why do no other COPPA-compliant account providers require anyone to fax or mail anything?
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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.
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...
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In a way, this is a useful life lesson: sometimes the most reasonable thing to do is to lie to unreasonable institutions.
And thereby commit a misdemeanor under some interpretations of the CFAA.
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And thereby commit a misdemeanor under some interpretations of the CFAA.
What are the odds of suffering any negative repercussions? Especially for a minor?
Not a good position to be in, honestly....
A similar article from this past July titled (aptly) "Google made my son cry": http://sunpig.com/martin/archives/2011/07/03/google-made-my-...