Videos
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2025
1:55 · 87K views · Aug 14, 2020
A short video claiming that the chat app PiperChat violated COPPA, the US children's online privacy law, because it had no parental consent form. It says this led to a very large fine. It appears to be a clip from the TV show Silicon Valley.
HN mostly cites it as a humorous or illustrative reference to an extreme COPPA penalty.
3 comments from Hacker News
The real answer is the same reason younger generations grew up learning how to use excel and word and windows, a rich company found yet another way to acclimate users to their ecosystem and bypass all those pesky regulations around tech and kids[1]. They give out dirt cheap tech to schools to get buy in, they get data, users, (mostly for life, how many non stem people do you all know who explore things like the software landscape?), in short, like everything else, money is the answer. they get marketshare. Schools get to boast about their modernity. only ones losing are us 99%'rs. [1] this video
There are different punishment classes for company. Fixed fines are only punishing small companies and are the cost of buisness for big companies priced into that buisness. (the fines appear market wide in the prices as jumps) Percentage punishments (x% of illegitimate gains) punish all companies equally and reduce interest in that market sector. Then there is lethal punishment ala Copa. this video If not deterrable via ablative company structures or other devices, these endavours kill, usually by scaling with the growth of crime. Are these classification groups correct? Did I miss one?
>Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. Reminds me of Silicon Valley. PiperChat has grossly violated COPPA as there was no parental consent form on the app leading to a 21 billion dollar fine: this video