Are your kids too stupid to lie their way into a free email account? CARU thinks so.
CARU (Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus), complained that Google’s GMail service didn’t do enough to prevent younger children from creating an account that might expose them to the internet garbage that normally lands in most normal email accounts. (h/t to bnet.com)
They pointed out that most other services ask the applicant’s age first, and then proceed to allow or deny access to the account-name creation step of the process — while GMail asks the applicant to create a user name first, then notes that persons must be 13 years of age, and then finally asks them their age.
CARU’s ideal that there are no children that will bother to try filling in an account-creation form a second time when told that they are too young, is much more telling about the idiots running that organization than the ‘sloppy and careless’ methods used by GMail to keep out youngsters.
I commented on bnet:
“So your kids are really, really stupid?CARU’s logic leads one to believe that kids are stupid enough to get stopped by the ‘other’ email services’ block on under-13 applicants.
If a child finds out that he/she cannot get an email account after submitting their under-13 birthday, only the really ignorant ones are going to be daft enough to not try lying about their age on the next try.
This is supposed to (somehow) be GMail’s fault?
If a child wants in, and you don’t ask for a credit card number (which is almost universally rejected by customers now as being too invasive), there is no way to keep the under-13 crowd out of your system.
This goes back to parenting, primarily.
An alternative (systemic) method would be for the services (ALL of them) to aggressively offer methods for parents to create sub-accounts with parental controls. AOL used to do this — does CARU honestly think there is no market for this now?
This is simply an attempt by CARU to appear authoritative and knowledgeable in a area where they have little clout.”
