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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Just read through some COPPA stuff. It looks like you could comply with a simple checkbox for "I am over <magic age>", which would be less information for the panopticon.

I'm no lawyer and can't say whether Google complied in a minimal fashion or not. But maybe not. [Edit: Checkboxes are insufficient, apparently]

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Google used to allow you to do just that and it was determined to be inadequate and was partially why they were fined $200 million.

Nice to know :-)

Any idea why that was deemed as inadequate? General lawyery assholeness or something genuine?

FWIW, I'm always happy to give my dob to these websites. Its the epoch of course. Memorable for me and boring for them.

Their implementation has to comply with laws in other countries too. Plenty of countries consider a checkbox too easy to accidentally tick, whereas asking for DOB requires a user to actively make up information, committing fraud if the information is false.

Also, you know, since Google knows the account age and all other information about the user it should be able to give an educated guess about the users age

But apparently Google's knowing that you're a right-handed tae-kwon-do enthusiast that flies every month is not sufficient for them to maybe think you're not a minor.

Does it matter what Google knows? Is a state regulator going to accept "Trust us, the algorithm says they're adults" when they come knocking?

It might be fraud for a child to give a false birthday to get access to an adult service (or vice versa) but it's not fraud merely to give a bogus birthday.

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