[danilocampos]

It seems like a very straightforward solution to me.

If an account is created for a person under-age, suspend ad service to that account (end data collection) and require a nominal fee to activate it (which provides abundant evidence of parental consent). Cutting off the next generation from email does not seem like the answer. Would a Montessori-educated, eight-year-old Sergey Brin have appreciated such treatment?

Since that won't happen, I mean, when we have kids I guess we just have to pay for hosting and administer their email ourselves?

[rmrm]

knowing the childs email address in and of itself appears to be data collection in regards to COPPA.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus45-how-comply-childrens...

[bmj]

Which means it would be impossible to provide an email service to a child, right, short of self-hosting?

[rmrm]

I don't think so, its just that you'd have to obtain parental consent 100% of the time. Data gathering is baked into providing an email service, that part of COPPA seems logical enough to me. The issue of targeted ads vs untargeted ads vs no ads doesn't appear to have anything to do with anything, other than what you'd notify the parents you are doing, and what you are asking their consent of.

[learc83]

So then everyone who doesn't want data collection or ads, but wants to use google just applies for an under 13 account.

Google products are free, they make money on data collection/advertisements. People who they can't advertise to aren't profitable, and it's unlikely a nominal fee would make up for all the overhead. The user is their product not their customer.

[danilocampos]

So you limit it to 500 MB of storage and show blanket Club Penguin ads instead of targeted ones. Whatever. It's a completely solvable problem. And it's fine if Google doesn't want to solve it. They should just let their ad agency know.

[learc83]

>show blanket Club Penguin ads

OK I concede that one, and it made me laugh.