Minors should be able to use with parental consent about site-policy

[ssokolow]

@Natureshadow

I'm sorry but, if that kind of name-calling and sour grapes behaviour is what you consider acceptable, I wouldn't want to send kids your way and risk that the community on edugit would teach them that such behaviour is acceptable in other parts of the open-source world.

[Natureshadow]

We completely agree, there are some really brilliant young coders out there, and we would love to encourage and nurture their skill. However, we don't have the ability to welcome them at this time.

Which makes GitHub a discriminating p.o.s. Block me if you want, but it will only give everyone less contributions and harm your image.

[mirabilos]

iargent dixit:

It creates problems for me with teaching younger kids. Older kids can sign up for an account with a personal email and then fork a repository for a lesson. I can't ask younger kids to break the ToS. Getting all parents on board may not be possible because they do not want to sign up for a service they don't really understand. I guess the only way around it is for me to host my own git server which eats into time I would rather spend on preparing lessons.

For what it’s worth, Teckids e.V. offers youth-friendly git hosting for educative/related projects for free on https://edugit.org/ Of course this still precludes minors from contributing to github-hosted projects but it may just suffice for your teaching situation (and if not contact the charity; we may be able to figure out a solution). bye, //mirabilos -- Thorsten Glaser (Founding Member) Teckids e.V. — Digital freedom with youth and education https://www.teckids.org/

[ssokolow]

You misunderstand. I'm already well-aware of everything I need to do and how to do it. I was just giving you a sample of the checklist I intend to find time to go through over the next little while.

(Also, this is off-topic so we should stop.)

[Tetizera-zz]

Yeah, it seems like a no-brainer. The "13 years old thing" is usually just standard in legal documents of tech companies, though.

Does Khan Academy have something similar in their document? I guess they could be an example to check about it.

[erkinalp]

We all know the reason: children cannot consent to a binding contract by themselves.

Does Khan Academy have something similar in their document?

They have "child account" and "parent account" things and parental consent for those between 13 and 18. One-time irrevocable parental consent with retroactive deletion of child in violations seems a reasonable compromise. We extend them into even younger children.

[erkinalp]

Added more clarification over parent's and child's IP stating child has a right to use parent's code ensured by parent.

[lee-dohm]

@Natureshadow your comment was deleted as a violation of the Site Policy Code of Conduct as it was insulting or derogatory. You may consider this an official warning.

[Natureshadow]

@Natureshadow your comment was deleted as a violation of the [Site Policy Code of Conduct](https://github.com/github/site-policy/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) as it was insulting or derogatory. You may consider this an official warning.

Hah, what :D? Now this makes GitHub finally unusable. There was NOTHING like that in my comment. Please prove that my comment violated this policy - deleting it and then making questionnable statements about it looks really weird.

[mirabilos]

Why would the parent need to have any age restriction except being 13 years or older?

(I can think of some very extreme cases where an under-18 parent could have a legal child old enough to code, and I see nothing that restricts this.)

I was told the age limit of 13 was due to COPPA and “nothing could be done about it”. As European, I can only shake my head on this, but whatever. Consult a lawyer specific to the USA and gather what exactly is required, instead of creating potentially not legal stuff like this.

[nsqe]

As I mentioned in #43, we are unable to allow minors under the age of 13 to have GitHub accounts. There are significant legal requirements (such as COPPA) regarding verifying parental consent, and we do not currently meet those requirements.

We completely agree, there are some really brilliant young coders out there, and we would love to encourage and nurture their skill. However, we don't have the ability to welcome them at this time.

[lee-dohm]

I deleted the above comment because it contained an advertisement.

[erkinalp]

Reconsider with MS acquistion. Microsoft has a very large team dedicated to child-friendly products.

[KOLANICH]

Reconsider with MS acquistion. Microsoft has a very large team dedicated to child-friendly products.

I guess it is unneeded. Children can always claim that they are more than 13 years old and GH won't (I hope) check it (for example by asking an ID or stalking on social networks) even if it could. These are just protective legal words which are de-facto as enforceable as some games asking users to input their age on first launch or as a ToS of some well-known torrent tracker prohibiting its usage for everyone except its owners. If the age is raised to 16 years old it doesn't make any difference for everyone except well-known public persons whose age is known by everyone, and even this doesn't prevent them from using a nickname.

[ssokolow]

Not necessarily.

Microsoft made sharing your smartphone number mandatory to log back into existing Hotmail accounts, which means that, if my old Hotmail account still exists, I can't get into it. If they know the smartphone, there's probably some way for them to age-verify.

I'm actually preparing to backup what I have on GitHub for fear that the acquisition by Microsoft will bring the same kind of "You abstain from having an SMS-capable phone number by choice? You don't exist." management to GitHub and lock me out.

[erkinalp]

16 years is GDPR&ePrivacy majority age. Microsoft has a team dedicated to child&family friendly software, hence they can adapt GitHub to be child friendly both in consent collection and other aspects.
Phone requirement is for single account per user enforcement, not real identity. GitHub does not have single account policy for paid accounts.

[KOLANICH]

Microsoft made sharing your smartphone number mandatory to log back into existing Hotmail accounts, which means that, if my old Hotmail account still exists, I can't get into it.

Ouch :( . Luckily, I don't have any private repos here. All I lose are interactions to the ones who are not #moving.

[mirabilos]

You seem to be awfully dependent on the location of the central repository of your decentral version control system…

[ssokolow]

It's more about stuff that is inherently tied to being logged into GitHub, like a complete list of secret (ie. unlisted) gists which may not all be embedded in my self-hosted blog, and ensuring that I've got alternative login options for any 3rd-party services which I currently log into via GitHub OAuth.

The rest shouldn't be too difficult for me to backup anonymously.

[j-f1]

a complete list of secret (ie. unlisted) gists

If you’re logged in, you can get that by going to https://gist.github.com/your-user-name/secret, i.e. https://gist.github.com/ssokolow/secret for you.

[iargent]

I guess it is unneeded. Children can always claim that they are more than 13 years old and GH won't (I hope) check it (for example by asking an ID or stalking on social networks) even if it could.

It creates problems for me with teaching younger kids. Older kids can sign up for an account with a personal email and then fork a repository for a lesson. I can't ask younger kids to break the ToS. Getting all parents on board may not be possible because they do not want to sign up for a service they don't really understand. I guess the only way around it is for me to host my own git server which eats into time I would rather spend on preparing lessons.