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Comment by DuncanIdaho | Hacker News Reader

What about the Google commercial, where parents open a childs google account upon birth, fill it with images and commentary...

Only to have it all deleted when Google get around to it?

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Pretty well covered here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3010687

TL;DR: The account in the commercial is the parent's, not the kid's.

Hard to believe the ad wasn't titled "Dear Sophie's Account Held by Myself, Her Father, Not to be Handed Over to Sophie until such time as she meets Google's User Age Threshold for Regulatory Compliance."

"Dear Sophie" does have a much nicer ring to it, I guess.

"Dear Sophie" pretty clearly implies it isn't Sophie's account to me. When you write an letter (especially one that hasn't been sent yet as the commercial implies), you are the owner of the letter, right? To cite the Bible, it is Paul's letters to the Corinthians, not the Corinthians' letters from Paul.

Leaving aside my glee that we must reach into mythology (edited, thanks rubidium) to help Google's case, any letter that begins "Dear Sophie" sounds like it's a letter... to Sophie. And while she might not be able to read it right now, my initial guess as to why would be that infants don't have great reading comprehension, not that Google can't find an algorithm to get around COPPA.

Entirely OT, but you did bring it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age. It would be iron age. And no historian disputes that an actual letter was written to Corinthians (and most are certain on Paul), so that takes out the mythology. At best, you can call it "Iron Age history of uncertain veracity". Sorry that it doesn't have quite the same demeaning effect.

Touché! Though the contents of said communiques do, indeed, form mythology.

Not sure what the age of the reference has to do with anything, but ok, here is a modern one. I write a poem, and send it to my girlfriend via email. Who is the author of the poem? I really don't get how intended recipient = account owner.

> I really don't get how intended recipient = account owner.

You can't send an email to someone who doesn't own an email account.

But the commercial isn't about sending emails to your daughter. The account is all emails sent to itself, which the father someday intends to log in and show to his daughter. It is the digital equivalent of keeping a scrapbook. The father creates the scrapbook about his daughter, and then shows it to her. I fail to see anyway this can be seen anything but the father's account.

> But the commercial isn't about sending emails to your daughter

That's very true, as I don't have a daughter. It's about one man sending emails to his daughter.

And the way I know that is it's called "Dear Sophie" and then the dude makes clear Sophie is his daughter. And the script, as written, has the narrator talking and writing to her, and not himself (which would have been less touching, if apparently more legally accurate).

IIRC, Sophie is old enough to read in at least part of the ad (though perhaps I expect kids to learn to read on the earlier side).

"Dear Sophie" implies that she will be reading the email. Which means she has an email address.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk

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