The under 13 thing, as has been discussed before, is due to COPPA. Google doesn't offer anything like hotmail's family account (where the child's account is managed by a proven parent's account), so if they find out that you're under 13, they have to close your account and they aren't allowed to warn you that they will do so (or let you go back and change your birthdate).
As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurred. People lost their google+ accounts, but the rest was just forum posts saying things like, "I remember reading about someone..." without providing the actual citation.
I was setting up my wife's account for youtube and accidentally put today's date in for her birthdate. I was immediately locked out and had to pay a fee to get her email back.
That's a new policy, it was more when I did it. It was summer 2011 but I can't find an email reciept so I'm not completely sure. I believe it was between $2-$5 at the time.
> While children under 13 can legally give out personal information with their parents' permission, many websites altogether disallow underage children from using their services due to the amount of paperwork involved.
What distinction are you making here? They also choose to not give you infinite storage space for free and choose to not indemnify you for copyright infringement when you send ripped mp3s as attachments. Every company operating in the US has to decide if offering services to children is worth the extra regulatory oversight.
If you'd like, I can rephrase, but the meaning is the same:
Google doesn't offer anything like hotmail's family account (where the child's account is managed by a proven parent's account), so if they find out that you're under 13, they will be in violation of the law if they do not close your account, and they aren't allowed to warn you that they will do so (or let you go back and change your birthdate).
The law provides a way to offer accounts to under-13s. They don't have to close the account, they just choose to close it instead of complying with the added burden that would be required.
If providing the current set of GMail features (including price) is uneconomical for Google after support for under-13s is added (and, AFAIK, all of the external evidence we have suggests that it is), then you're making a distinction without a difference.
I believe the point is that you're lying when you say, quote, "they have to close the account".
Google could simply choose not to collect personal information on accounts of children. This would be, literally, one line of code to implement. They've chosen instead to ban children from Google services, which is in no way required by law.
Well, thanks for the "lying" comment. They don't have to pay taxes either, but that won't last long.
As for the literally one line of code, I don't believe that's correct. IANAL nor an implementor of a COPPA-compliant product, but my understanding is that even storing a copy of an email that contains personal information will be in violation of the law without parental consent and certainly without the ability for a parent to view it and delete it. Storing any received and sent email may be enough to count as collecting personal information.
Can you name any email provider that will knowingly allow children under 13 to use the service without having a parent controlling the account? When you do use the family accounts in hotmail or yahoo, you have to actually provide proof that you're an adult, and some level of proof of connection with the account (joining the accounts actually looks rather difficult, through hotmail, at least. Usually a parent account sets up child accounts). Setting up that system literally takes more than one line of code.
As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurred. People lost their google+ accounts, but the rest was just forum posts saying things like, "I remember reading about someone..." without providing the actual citation.