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Comment by amitparikh | Hacker News Reader

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

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COPPA doesn't ban Google from providing services to kids. It just means they have to put additional precautions in place if they do - which obviously costs money, so their default position has been to opt out of servicing kids at all. This youtube announcement obviously represents a realization that that cost may be worth bearing... presumably because raising a generation of youtube-savvy kids is going to build their market for the next generation.

I don't know enough about COPPA to know who to blame. There are two possibilities:

1. COPPA goes too far

2. Google has done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that it's cheaper to ban children than to lead the charge in teasing out the edge cases

If #2 is the case it's absolutely reasonable to blame google. Of course, deciding who to blame isn't productive, what we really want to do is lobby for change. Now that google is playing the lobbying game they're a reasonable party to appeal to regardless of whether #1 or #2 is closer to the truth.

For me, that's where it gets interesting: as I understand, it is perfectly legal for Google to provide services to children, but they must obtain parental consent, first [1]. The problem is that isn't something they're interested in doing.

[1] http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/comp... Parental

When this happened to my son, rather than deleting everything and losing all his contacts and emails with his auntie etc etc, google just demanded I pay a bribe of 50 cents on a credit card, on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents. At least this is how they did it back in the good old days.

>on the hilarious assumption that the only people in a family with access to CC are parents //

Hilarious? How do under-13s get banks to issue them credit cards? Presumably they only allow the payment from a CC connected to an account rather than a payment card (I assume payment gateways do that sort of differentiation).

Even if some under-13s can access and use a credit-card it seems likely to me that the vast majority would be blocked by such a system. I can see kids stealing cash from their parents, perhaps, but stealing when you know it's going to appear on their bank-statement?? Just to use YouTube? Then you need to be able to actually perform the payment; no-one else [that I know of] knows my CC password and it's certainly not written down anywhere.

For general interest, note that a transaction on a credit card is one of the explicit ways COPPA allows for verifying that someone is not a child. See §312.5(b)(2) in https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/312.5

Any hilarity should be taken up with congress.

I got a debit card when I got my first bank account at 10 years old in ~2001. I didn't pay for anything online with it until my mid teens (when I had a job), but I do remember having to use it to verify my account for the SecondLife teen grid.

Virtually all bank accounts come with debit cards nowadays, if your parents are forward thinking enough to set you up with a bank account then you could have a card very young.

I got a debit card somewhere around becoming a teenager. But it was probably a decade later that I got my first _credit_ card. They're quite different things.

In the UK under 18 you can't usually be held to a contract and so you don't have to pay back a credit card debt - this makes companies more than a little reluctant to lend to under 18s. You can't get a credit card until you're 18.

Citizens Advice (an established UK charity) say:

>"If you are under 18, it is a criminal offence for anyone to send you material inviting you to borrow money or obtain goods or services on credit or hire purchase. However, if you are over 14 but under 18, you can enter into a credit or hire purchase agreement if an adult acts as your guarantor."

Of course it might vary enormously in other countries but I'd be surprised if it was wildly different in USA?

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