I was thinking of using Path as a personal diary. But not anymore. Just deleted Path app. I would suggest everyone to do the same. A lesson for Path and others.
This is absurd. Instead of not collecting data for children Google is blocking access to children. I am seriously looking for alternatives to Gmail. Any suggestions? I don't want my email account hooked up to a social network and advertising machinery.
This has been covered on HN before, the solution is pretty simple: just use a (free) Google Apps account instead and create accounts for your children. You will be responsible for complying with COPPA yourself instead of Google.
All you need is a domain name, but it's a good idea to have that anyways in case you ever want to leave. I use this solution with my kids and it works great because it also allows me to control access to certain services and reset passwords for them, etc.
It's a bit more complex than that. In order to comply, Google would need to verify that you are a parent/guardian and that you are giving permission for your child to join. Faxing of identity documents would likely be involved.
Google's approach is heavy handed, but it's a really bad law.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Its very easy, simply jump onto Amazon's ec2 free instance and setup a webserver/webmail vm
it will cost you very little and you will not have to deal with crap like that, alternatively you can have a chat to your friendly domain hosting company, I am sure they will have something that will fit your needs.
But since Google can't collect data to target ad to the children, Google doesn't make any money from them. Google don't need children that can't pay money. Case closed.
I would imagine (and clearly, I'm not an IPO underwriter) that it might have something to do with proving they have a stable, profitable model. Twitter is finally on the way there with their ads, less sure about Foursquare.
Companies like Uber and AirBnb already have their business models mapped out, so even though they are orders of magnitude smaller, they are more attractive to IPO underwriters.
I think Coda did a good job in posting Yammer's official position clarifying the situation and it's a captivating blog post.
Many people (including some people on HN) started criticizing Yammer because they decided to go back to Java. This blog post was in some sense necessary for Yammer.
You are forgetting Google Buzz/Wave/Knoll, services that are shut down after launching with a lot of fanfare. Now days every time Google launches a new service I am not sure whether that service will be around for another year or so.
Except search I have lost faith in Google to solve my problems with new services. Google's main aim seems to be to serve ads. All the services they have launched for free is to serve more ads. They copy popular services to serve more ads, make it free, and kill competition.
There are three possible outcomes for startups: (1) failure; (2) marginally successful; and (3) enormously successful. In case of (1) and (2) employees hardly make any money, and early employees may make money in case (3). More than 99% startups' outcome is either (1) or (2).
I feel startup world is highly skewed in favor of investors and founders. I have worked at a startup and now I would think twice before working for another startup, since rewards don't add up to effort and time because of odds.
I had similar experiences with Wikipedia. First time, I added some references and definitions related to a theoretical computer science concept and it was deleted for no reason.
Since then I stopped making edits unless something is incorrect.
