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Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

A parent can't 'over-rule' a federal law.

"Hey Mr Food-N-Liquor owner, I give you consent for you to sell my 18 year old alcohol" etc

COPPA explicitly provides for a parental consent mechanism; Google simply doesn't choose to implement it. Everybody else implements it just fine.

Had never tried, so I just tried to create an underage account at Yahoo, they handle it thusly:

Please get your mom or dad! You need your parent or guardian's permission to continue. Show them this screen. Parents, Please Sign-In.

To complete your child's Yahoo! registration:

Sign in with your own Yahoo! ID or sign up for a new account by clicking on the "Create New Account" button below. Confirm your child's information on the next page. You will need a major credit card. To create a Yahoo! ID for your child, we require your consent to collect, use and disclose certain personal information about him or her. You can give this consent by signing in to Yahoo!, reviewing and editing the information your child provided, and then submitting the form on your child's behalf.

You will be charged 50 cents to help confirm that a parent or guardian more than 18 years old is involved. Yahoo! will donate a portion of that charge to charity.

Your child will be able to use most of Yahoo!'s unmoderated services, including Messenger, Mail, Groups and Message Boards. Learn how to make smart and safer choices online and get advice on using Yahoo! products safely.

When my child gets a little older he is going to be 13 for a very long time, online.

I'm glad he's progressing.

If the internet had existed when I was a little tike, I'd have been 13 for about eight years.

Everyone else? Hardly. Facebook doesn't implement it. Twitter doesn't implement it. MSN doesn't. Pretty much all forums out there require you to "verify" that you're older than 13 to post. Google is hardly the only site to judge the consent mechanism exception to be too burdensome and unprofitable to implement.

Microsoft's Live ID absolutely supports this when signing up for, among other things, Hotmail accounts, Messenger accounts, etc. It follows the same basic process as Yahoo, including the $0.50 charge that's partially donated to charity.

Microsoft's implementation has the fun feature that all mail to the "kid" needs to be approved by he parent. Very fun if a college student puts in the wrong age which triggers those notices to go to the admin account for he college. You need to call customer support to fix this. This was not a fun call.

OK, to be more specific: everybody else has implemented some way for kids under 13 to use their service. That Google does this with the same heavyhanded approach they use for everything else having to do with meatspace is just ... hell, I don't know. Lazy? Short-sighted? Klutzy? Ridiculous?

Actually, in many states parents CAN give consent for their children to have alcohol.

For example, section 4301.69 of the Ohio Revised Code states "Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, no person shall sell beer or intoxicating liquor to an underage person...unless the underage person is supervised by a parent, ..." (Quote abbreviated for brevity, but the elided portion doesn't change the meaning)

Except, of course, that COPPA has a parental consent provision. The problem is the burden of verifiability.

Which other services like Yahoo seem to have no problem with.

Which is kind of ironic, given that 18 seems to be the world-wide consensus for being of legal age [1] and drinking age [2]. But your point stands, of course: No overruling of that fact by a parent or - god forbid - the 18 year old that should be protected.

No attack against you or your values (if you even share those represented by the laws), but - yeah - I wanted to rub in the fact that this is kind of anti-liberal. And - maybe the basis that supports laws like that is to blame for COPPA as well?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_age#Countries_and_subdiv...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_age

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