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Comment by GrinningFool | Hacker News Reader

If they hadn't started collecting data, the age of their users would continue to be irrelevant.

It still is irrelevant, if you use it offline, or you opt out of the analytics. Yes, an adult will probably have to set it up that way for them, but this has always been the case with any internet-enabled computer: it falls on the parents (or the school, childcare service, etc) to set up parental controls and oversee the child's online activity.

I think their approach is pretty sane - I don't know if it started out that way, but 'opt in only' seems like the defaults we want. But like parental responsibility, that's aside from the main point.

The fact that they are collecting this data now subjects them to COPPA requirements, thus the restriction to people over 13. If they hadn't started collecting data, they would not have had to comply with that restriction.

That seems to not really be relevant, if you want to have a data-driven development process, then you have to, you know, collect data. If you said they should just use email or github issues or something, and have people submit their feedback manually, those have the same deal, and they still would have to comply with COPPA regarding that data.

Yes, that is true - they would have to comply regarding the data collection. However, they would not need to impose limitations on the usage of application itself, only on the tools/platform used to submit the data.

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