Dear Google: Why did you ban teenagers from Google+?

I hope the OP is reading this - I highly doubt Google is mistrusting its teenager population, you might be reading into this more than you should. The invalid invites that got sent out - more than just the teenage crowd were offended.<p>Let's look at this a different way - you're 14, you're on the Internet. You start a hangout...to extended circles. Certain people join, and you get more "hanging out" than you had intended. And now questions are being asked. Did your parents consent to this? Where was the form that required parents to agree? Should there be restrictions on underage accounts? What kind of data should be public?<p>There's just a lot of legal issues, more than you'd expect. It requires a set of both design and engineering effort to get it just right. Google will get there. I hate to sound like a broken record but it's still in the feedback/reiteration stage (aka "field trial").

Or, you know, all those pesky laws. Like the ones that deal with what information you can legally store about minors, most of which GMail and Google+ would violate due to their very nature.<p>I don't blame them at all. It isn't Google's fault, it's the fault of whoever decided that 'protected' teenagers meant forcing them to lie about their age to get accounts on the net.

I understand how you feel, but I can't imagine Google's restricting the service for anything but practical reasons. Minors are, legally, a special case, and Google+, being in such an early stage of development, might not have the privacy features necessary yet, or they may not feel ready to test them. A legal issue arising from minors using the service at this point in the product's lifecycle would be disastrous PR-wise.

Tries to blame Google+ for what is essentially an Internet wide issue. There are thorny legal issues involved that aren't limited to just COPPA.<p>Facebook did just fine restricting its website to just college kids.