Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

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> Age is very important for leveling kids appropriately and keeping them safe, which is why birth certificates are required — parents are insane and go to extreme lengths (I personally encountered forged documents, parents who delayed entry into kindergarten to age 6, bogus documents from siblings or cousins, etc) to try to let older kids play in younger levels.

This being HN, I figure I can make this criticism and be understood even if it breaks the rules here:

Either Little League operates on a human web of trust-- where parents show the documents to a human like you, who then signs-off on the age/residency verification, on up the chain as the Linux Kernel devs work; or, Little League requires a sophisticated digital system for accepting and verifying the documents with lots of personally identifying information in them. If it's the latter, fine-- but then that system is subject to the same scrutiny that Signal, Clubhouse, Experion, and every other digital system out there.

With that in mind, Little League's privacy policy as written is a dangerous pile of horseshit, and your rank speculation that they're probably not leveraging it the way the rest of data miners would isn't helping.

So while this is pretty accurate I think the last part could be said more nicely.

I get why you’re upset / impassioned, I am too about this in general, but I believe the person you are replying to was acting in good faith and giving a perspective most of us here do not have.

From a more pragmatic perspective this behavior discourages others, both directly and indirectly, from contributing in the future for fear of saying something wrong or incorrectly. Of course there is a balance.

Fair point. Let me try again:

That ToS is dangerous and should be changed ASAP.

If OP knows the inner workings of Little League well enough to claim that the ToS is a case of overly-broad boilerplate, OP can message someone relevant in the org to tell them to change it so it isn't as dangerous.

That doesn't address the broader problem of whether the data really is kept safe. But it at least raises the cost to someone who is considering (or already has considered) mining that data.

I have a difficult time believing that an org with a non-negligible number of participants willing to risk harm to 8 year-olds for the benefit of their 11 year-old would have zero participants willing to leverage an overly-broad ToS for personal gain.

This comment sounds like something Linus Torvalds would say - completely eviscerating but entirely accurate.

HN is unable to conceive of an alternate model to human cooperation, it's the Linux Kernel or the abyss

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