W
Wowbagger
Guest
Awesome question. Exactly the thing I worried about constantly when I was 12 years old and tried to register for message boards with age verification for under-thirteens. It’s not scrupulous to worry about whether we are obliged to follow laws that none of our peers follow! (Indeed, if we assumed otherwise, it’s a short step to large-scale music piracy.)
I’m going to riff on Aquinas here for a moment. Aquinas lists four criteria for a law to be valid and effective: it must be (1) an ordinance of reason, (2) for the common good, (3) promulgated and enforced by (4) a legitimate authority.
We can’t translate this definition (which applies to civil law) directly to the murky world of contract law, but let’s play with it for a minute anyway. Google is a legitimate authority in this matter, because Google owns the servers and services you’re using and is in some way responsible for your use of them. So it is allowed to make rules about its services, and we are obliged to follow them, if they meet the other criteria. Moreover, we give ample deference to Google’s rulemaking decisions, because, as the legitimate authority, they are the ones who get to decide whether their ordinances are reasonable and dedicated to the common good.
The trouble here is that Google does not promulgate or enforce this rule. Sure, it posted it in an obscure clause of its TOS, but it’s never given any hint to anyone that it doesn’t want young kids using its service. Indeed, to the contrary, its daily behavior contradicts its own TOS – it encourages violations of it. We see from its Google Account signup behavior that Google manifestly does not enforce this policy in any way.
In my opinion, this is not a valid ordinance for that reason. Perhaps it is reasonable and directed to the common good, but Google cannot encourage people to violate its own rules and expect it to be treated, by man or by God, as if they were real rules.
And so we find that it is, in fact, what we’ve always suspected it to be – legal boilerplate, hardly worth the paper its printed on, designed to cover Google’s butt in a court case. And, incidentally, under the laws of our country, this piece of boilerplate would not stand up in court, precisely because Google neither promulgates it or enforces it.
Yup! American law is satisfyingly sensible from time to time, and it does owe that in part to our Scholastic forefathers.
BOTTOM LINE: No worries, man. Go for it. Use all the Google services to your heart’s content. This analysis may not apply to other age-restricted services on other sites, however; you must evaluate the seriousness and enforcedness of a site’s age-restriction policies on a case-by-case basis.
I’m going to riff on Aquinas here for a moment. Aquinas lists four criteria for a law to be valid and effective: it must be (1) an ordinance of reason, (2) for the common good, (3) promulgated and enforced by (4) a legitimate authority.
We can’t translate this definition (which applies to civil law) directly to the murky world of contract law, but let’s play with it for a minute anyway. Google is a legitimate authority in this matter, because Google owns the servers and services you’re using and is in some way responsible for your use of them. So it is allowed to make rules about its services, and we are obliged to follow them, if they meet the other criteria. Moreover, we give ample deference to Google’s rulemaking decisions, because, as the legitimate authority, they are the ones who get to decide whether their ordinances are reasonable and dedicated to the common good.
The trouble here is that Google does not promulgate or enforce this rule. Sure, it posted it in an obscure clause of its TOS, but it’s never given any hint to anyone that it doesn’t want young kids using its service. Indeed, to the contrary, its daily behavior contradicts its own TOS – it encourages violations of it. We see from its Google Account signup behavior that Google manifestly does not enforce this policy in any way.
In my opinion, this is not a valid ordinance for that reason. Perhaps it is reasonable and directed to the common good, but Google cannot encourage people to violate its own rules and expect it to be treated, by man or by God, as if they were real rules.
And so we find that it is, in fact, what we’ve always suspected it to be – legal boilerplate, hardly worth the paper its printed on, designed to cover Google’s butt in a court case. And, incidentally, under the laws of our country, this piece of boilerplate would not stand up in court, precisely because Google neither promulgates it or enforces it.
Yup! American law is satisfyingly sensible from time to time, and it does owe that in part to our Scholastic forefathers.
BOTTOM LINE: No worries, man. Go for it. Use all the Google services to your heart’s content. This analysis may not apply to other age-restricted services on other sites, however; you must evaluate the seriousness and enforcedness of a site’s age-restriction policies on a case-by-case basis.
You are paid by use of the search engine, which seems to be a decent service. Or isn’t that how it works? My personal ratio of nerdiness to clueless computer user is low these days.
divided by :manvspc: equals approximately 10%
I dont think your violating a law, just a company policy perhaps. OOps. I used to work as an orderly in a phych hospital. My charge nurse broke the rules all the time. He would totally go against the Doctors orders if it was in the best interest of the patient. He was never wrong. 
God bless