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This is not really sufficient. Anyone who does not have an established handle needs to spend a year or so acquiring a following under some other services in order to be good enough for Google Plus. Consider, for example, kids who want to create their first pseudonym. This kind of policy very much pushes them toward using their real names, arguably at the time in their life when it is worst to do so.

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This is incorrect. If they find out you're a kid trying to be safe online, they'll help you out by summarily deleting your account.

Problem solved!

...as mandated by law.

Which law? I'm not American so I'm not familiar with this. But there's certainly plenty of kids on other sites that are used for communications, so what makes Google delete kids' accounts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pro...

The tldr is that it's a notoriously difficult law to comply with unless (1) your site has limited userbase or functionality, or (2) you delete children's accounts on sight.

Holy shit. You'd think someone at Google would be evaluating hosting mail in a datacenter outside the US, at least for the accounts in question.

I haven't read through COPPA, but I believe that Google, as a US company, has to abide by COPPA restrictions, regardless of where they're storing data. (It might even apply to non-US users...) As the user above pointed out, COPPA is really, really hard to 'get around.'

Some verification / disproving would be welcome.

I've always been confused by this. Does "as a US company" mean that it's HQ is in the US? Or that it is incorporated in the US? Or just that it does business in the US?

Actually that's not mandated by law at all.

What is in the law is an onus of responsiblity on service providers like Google to protect people under 13. So the response of Google/Facebook etc.. simply make it part of their terms that children cannot use their services - and will be summarily deleted if they do. (Google policy not 'the law').

Net result is parents help their kids online by showing them how to lie about their age. Google's ass remains covered but they are not able to actually protect kids because they don't know their ages.

Not good enough by any stretch.

So which of the following obstacles should Google place as a sign-up barrier in front of every new user on any of its services?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pro...

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