When the games launched I went to try a few and they all demanded to know my personal information - name, birth date, etc. I was pretty offended by that and never bothered going further. I'm generally OK with targeted advertising but there is zero reason for a game to need to know my full name and birth date.
The utter absurdity of such checks boggles my mind.
Also noticed them when simply accessing sites which just contain information about a game, seriously, wtf? Does anyone visiting such a site ever bother to enter their actual age/birth-date?
Sounds like the result of some extremely dumb law and management not having the guts to do the right thing and ignore it.
If you don't want to allow < 13, you just need to make sure you ask and don't accept people who reply with < 13. It then becomes the kid's legal guardian responsibility to make sure the child doesn't use the service.
If you do want to accept it, you need to use IRL methods (phone call, credit card, etc).
Am I reading this properly or did you suggest that Google should be above the law?
They download/copy content from millions of sites without explicit permission.
Of course that example is more ambiguous as the definition of fair use is vague (and ever-changing), but is not all that different.
If every business followed every law in the books the economy would crawl to a halt.