Google sought fellow tech giants' help in stalling kids' privacy protections
I really wish we had less kneejerk cliche-recycling (eg &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; comments) commenters here just looking for confirmation bias because this is a difficult issue.<p>First, kids use sites and apps when they&#x27;re below the ToS age (usually 18 or sometimes 13, at least in the US). How are you meant to know that as a service provider? Don&#x27;t get me wrong: it doesn&#x27;t excuse you from doing due diligence. There&#x27;s such a thing as wanton disregard for the truth. But we all know under 18s use IG, Snapchat, Tinder, etc. I&#x27;m not sure fining a company billions of dollars and putting executives in jail is the outcome anyone really wants if a 17 year old uses Tinder.<p>Second, what is personal information, exactly? It&#x27;s not as obvious as you might think to the point where lawyers who work for these companies can&#x27;t agree among themselves. There are obvious things (eg IP addresses, dates of birth, SSNs, addresses, names). But what about media? Photos, videos and sound files may all contain PII, technically.<p>Third, some will say &quot;well don&#x27;t store anything&quot;. Well, if a photo contains PII (which it can) then you can&#x27;t operate a photo-sharing service at all for risk of storing PII of children. Also, this ignores legal obligations. If the Feds show up with a warrant about a particular user&#x27;s actions then the argument &quot;we log&#x2F;store nothing&quot; won&#x27;t get you as far as you think.<p>So I&#x27;m not saying Google didn&#x27;t do wrong here but knowing the complexities I am sympathetic to the idea of resisting broad legislative overreach as you can end up with bad laws that do just that.<p>And if we&#x27;re going to start singling out tech giants for lobbying Congress, my question is why them in particular? We currently have a Senate that is essentially beholden to the personal interests of one unelected rich guy: Charles Koch. Koch lobbies against health care, taxes on the rich and infrastructure in the Senate. Around the country, he has been instrumental in defeating public transit and many other initiatives in many cities.