Dear Google: Why did you ban teenagers from Google+? | Hacker News Reader

Dear Google: Why did you ban teenagers from Google+?

leilavc.posterous.com

6 pointsleilavc5 comments

I hope the OP is reading this - I highly doubt Google is mistrusting its teenager population, you might be reading into this more than you should. The invalid invites that got sent out - more than just the teenage crowd were offended.

Let's look at this a different way - you're 14, you're on the Internet. You start a hangout...to extended circles. Certain people join, and you get more "hanging out" than you had intended. And now questions are being asked. Did your parents consent to this? Where was the form that required parents to agree? Should there be restrictions on underage accounts? What kind of data should be public?

There's just a lot of legal issues, more than you'd expect. It requires a set of both design and engineering effort to get it just right. Google will get there. I hate to sound like a broken record but it's still in the feedback/reiteration stage (aka "field trial").

Thanks for your response! No, Google today still doesn't ask for your age when you create an account, and I'm actually not personally aware of any US bill that regulates how internet companies have to deal with teenagers. It seems like a bit of a legal gray area.

The thing is, we get that scenario that you gave with the hangouts and circles with Facebook, which teenagers use all the time. And, again, those questions you brought up are part of the legal gray area I mentioned above, of how much control the government and parents should have over how teenagers can use the internet.

I think the main frustration I have here is that I have other friends who never gave their ages to Google - i.e., who never signed up for a Youtube account - who have been able to get onto Google Plus. (I know because they keep sending me invites. It's quite aggravating.) Which just goes to show that Google's rules aren't even being evenly applied across the board.

But hey, fair enough. As I said at the end, I just hope they get out of the field trial stage soon. And for now, I'm off to make a new anonymous Google account. :)

Or, you know, all those pesky laws. Like the ones that deal with what information you can legally store about minors, most of which GMail and Google+ would violate due to their very nature.

I don't blame them at all. It isn't Google's fault, it's the fault of whoever decided that 'protected' teenagers meant forcing them to lie about their age to get accounts on the net.

I understand how you feel, but I can't imagine Google's restricting the service for anything but practical reasons. Minors are, legally, a special case, and Google+, being in such an early stage of development, might not have the privacy features necessary yet, or they may not feel ready to test them. A legal issue arising from minors using the service at this point in the product's lifecycle would be disastrous PR-wise.

Tries to blame Google+ for what is essentially an Internet wide issue. There are thorny legal issues involved that aren't limited to just COPPA.

Facebook did just fine restricting its website to just college kids.

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