151–160 of 199 posts
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.
What would you suggest for comparable calendar and contact management software?
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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.
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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.
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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…
On a side note- even if I lose my staff, I lose some chunk or revenue, that does not make my staff my customer.
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.
Android...... Where does it say anywhere that Android devices can only be sold to those old enough not to be covered by COPPA?
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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.
That's a terrible analogy and if you want to go there, Disney has made plenty of little girls cry every day.
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It really feels like stone 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.
In a way, this is a useful life lesson: sometimes the most reasonable thing to do is to lie to unreasonable institutions.
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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.
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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.