Added parental consent language #43
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Consenter age is raised for corporate consenters to prevent child abuse by corporate accounts
| 6. “GitHub,” “We,” and “Us” refer to GitHub, Inc., as well as our affiliates, directors, subsidiaries, contractors, licensors, officers, agents, and employees. | ||
| 7. A "Corporate Account" refers to any account created by a User on behalf of an entity, such as a company, non-profit organization, or group. A Corporate Account may include a Business plan, a Team plan, or a Developer plan. | ||
| 8. “Content” refers to content featured or displayed through the Website, including without limitation text, data, articles, images, photographs, graphics, software, applications, designs, features, and other materials that are available on the Website or otherwise available through the Service. "Content" also includes Services. “User-Generated Content” is Content, written or otherwise, created or uploaded by our Users. “Paid Content” is Content only available to Users who are participating in a payment plan, including private repositories. | ||
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| ### B. Account Terms | ||
| **Short version:** *A human must create your account; the creator and Users of your account must be 13 or over; you must provide a valid email address; and you may not have more than one free account. You alone are responsible for your account and anything that happens while you are signed in to or using your account. You are responsible for keeping your account secure.* | ||
| **Short version:** *A human must create your account; the creator of your account must be 24 or over; you must provide a valid email address; and you may not have more than one free account. You alone are responsible for your account and anything that happens while you are signed in to or using your account. You are responsible for keeping your account secure.* |
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Not a bug? We'll just raise the voting and smoking age to match. ;)
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That seems arbitrary at best. Make it 18 -- the age of 13 is to comply wth COPPA... so I'm 👎 on this.
| @@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ You must create an individual account before you can create a Corporate Account. | |||
| - You must be a human to create an account. Accounts registered by "bots" or other automated methods are not permitted. We do permit machine accounts: | |||
| - A machine account is an account set up by an individual human who accepts the Terms on behalf of the account, provides a valid email address, and is responsible for its actions. A machine account is used exclusively for performing automated tasks. Multiple users may direct the actions of a machine account, but the owner of the account is ultimately responsible for the machine's actions. You may maintain no more than one free machine account in addition to your free personal account. | |||
| - One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine). | |||
| - You may not create an account for the use of any User under the age of 13. While we are thrilled to see brilliant young coders get excited by learning to program, we must comply with United States law. GitHub does not target our Service to children under 13, and we do not permit any Users under 13 on our Service. If we learn of any User under the age of 13, we will [terminate that User’s account immediately](#l-cancellation-and-termination). If you are a resident of a country outside the United States, your country’s minimum age may be older; in such a case, you are responsible for complying with your country’s laws. | |||
| - User of a corporate account must be either older than 13 (people under this age will be referred to as an "underage" in the following text), or consented by a person's account who is over 24 who is the parent or the legal guardian of the said minor (referred to as a "consenter"). Consenters are required to verify that he/she/it is said underage's parent or legal guardian. GitHub may employ any kind of software checks and/or request identity information in the verification requests to verify said fact. Once consented, that consent cannot be revoked even if any of those accounts are closed in the future. This is required because underages cannot consent by themselves in the most of the world, including the United States, in which GitHub has its legal personhood. Violation of this policy leads to [termination and deletion of all of your code and all their forks](#l-cancellation-and-termination). If you are a resident of a country outside the United States, your country’s minimum age may be older; in such a case, you are responsible for complying with your country’s laws. Age restrictions does not apply to legal entities creating corporate accounts but do apply to their representatives if exist. | |||
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or consented by a person's account who is over 24 why 24 ? legal majority is 18 in most countries or 21
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he/she/it maybe instead use he/she/they since it might just mean that the account is a robot, and we want to include people who do not prefer to use the he/she pronouns.
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The age of 24 is suspect here, what happens when there is a person who is say 7years old and wanting to learn programming, with a 23yo parent. This person would not have a guardian or parent over 24. Further the parent would not nescesarily have the ability to use the service either. It is a strangely high age as many developers in the industry are not that age (I know many people in the employ of such companies as Google who are, and you would expect that they get parental consent?) |
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Even in Turkey (OP's country) the age of majority is 18. Keep it at 18 (or the country's age of majority) unless you can provide specific reasons why we need a parental/guardian consent to be provided by anyone older. |
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In the end, 13 is the minimum age allowed under US law i.e. COPPA as mentioned previously. Though I have no issues with under 13s using the service (with parental/guardian consent - does age of this person actually matter here) I understand why it is there. |
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If this were to ever get in -- this would be HORRIBLE |
Yeah, 24 is bizarre. It would mean people who have started working, have their own apartment, are legally allowed to vote etc, would not be legally allowed to create a GitHub account, they have to call their parents about it. This must be adjusted to 18 years or similar. |
You will first learn to use consented by your parent under 13, then use by yourself from 13 to 21, then you can be trusted to safely consent to your child's coding. Think like apprenticeships.
You had a child at 15? |
| @@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ You must create an individual account before you can create a Corporate Account. | |||
| - You must be a human to create an account. Accounts registered by "bots" or other automated methods are not permitted. We do permit machine accounts: | |||
| - A machine account is an account set up by an individual human who accepts the Terms on behalf of the account, provides a valid email address, and is responsible for its actions. A machine account is used exclusively for performing automated tasks. Multiple users may direct the actions of a machine account, but the owner of the account is ultimately responsible for the machine's actions. You may maintain no more than one free machine account in addition to your free personal account. | |||
| - One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine). | |||
| - You may not create an account for the use of any User under the age of 13. While we are thrilled to see brilliant young coders get excited by learning to program, we must comply with United States law. GitHub does not target our Service to children under 13, and we do not permit any Users under 13 on our Service. If we learn of any User under the age of 13, we will [terminate that User’s account immediately](#l-cancellation-and-termination). If you are a resident of a country outside the United States, your country’s minimum age may be older; in such a case, you are responsible for complying with your country’s laws. | |||
| - User of a corporate account must be either older than 13 (people under this age will be referred to as an "underage" in the following text), or consented by a person's account who is over 21 who is the parent or the legal guardian of the said minor (referred to as a "consenter"). Consenters are required to verify that he/she/it is said underage's parent or legal guardian. GitHub may employ any kind of software checks and/or request identity information in the verification requests to verify said fact. Once consented, that consent cannot be revoked even if any of those accounts are closed in the future. This is required because underages cannot consent by themselves in the most of the world, including the United States, in which GitHub has its legal personhood. Violation of this policy leads to [termination and deletion of all of your code and all their forks](#l-cancellation-and-termination). If you are a resident of a country outside the United States, your country’s minimum age may be older; in such a case, you are responsible for complying with your country’s laws. Age restrictions does not apply to legal entities creating corporate accounts but do apply to their representatives if exist. | |||
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Fixed that. Initially thought corporate accounts were given to organisations, not natural persons. |
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Shouldn't we leave things like this to lawyers? Not sure if the OP is a lawyer... |
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I am not a lawyer. |
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Therein lies the problem with this PR -- you are not a lawyer. This PR is all well intentioned but things like this require knowledge of the laws. |
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The other things you leave open-ended are: how does parental consent happen? Who has to verify it? This is a great idea but introduces overhead that unless @github is willing to take on this overhead, it's burdensome. |
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Like Facebook checks for real names, GitHub will check for consenter being actually eligible for consenting by instituting ID checks and/or software measures. Then consenter will consent to minor/constrict opening account via his parental/guardian control interface. |
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Two commits I have recently added handles becoming adult or constrict, what happens to account when getting out of constrict status. |
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Who is responsible for this? |
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Lawyers should be writing this, not a lay person. |
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@erkinalp -- So I have to give Github my ID? What's to stop a person from lying...let's NOT turn this into FB -- FB's real name policy is an absolute disaster and is arbitrarily enforced. |
If and only if you want to consent to your child/constrict opening an account. In all other cases, you may remain pseudonymous. |
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How is this data maintained? How long do they hold onto these records? You need to cover this. |
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In some jurisdictions, storing documents required for consent for extended period of time is illegal itself. As such those documents need to be discarded almost immediately. Like already pointed out, it would be quite burdensome for GitHub staff to actually to verify that the person posting the documents is the same person mentioned in the documents. It is for example quite easy for anyone living in the same house to have access to birth certificate of the underage person or to have access to scanned copy of personal identification card, passport or driver license. |
e.g. Linking to government digital signature solutions where they exist. Most have e-parental consent application. That way, only the result of consent will be notified to GitHub, it will not be tracking papers. |
Policies/github-privacy-statement.md
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| ### How we share the information we collect | ||
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| We **do not** share, sell, rent, or trade User Personal Information with third parties for their commercial purposes. | ||
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| We do not disclose User Personal Information outside GitHub, except in the situations listed in this section or in the section below on [Compelled Disclosure](#how-we-respond-to-compelled-disclosure). | ||
| We do not disclose User Personal Information outside GitHub, except in the situations listed in this section or in the section below on [Compelled Disclosure](#how-we-respond-to-compelled-disclosure). We do **not** share consent information about non-self-consenting accounts except when required by law. Once consent happened, we do **not** store your identity information unless you shared that already for some other reason. Parental/guardian consent is *permanent* and *irrevocable*; user handles, not real identity, are stored to look up for consent information. |
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"unless you shared that already for some other reason." would be troublesome as in most legislations it would be illegal to associate information collected during consent procedure with any information collected during any other procedure. As such it needs to be reworded or removed.
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what if there was a github for lawyers and/or international treaties? gives me an idea for a startup |
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@nukeop Isn't one GitHub enough... Why would anyone need or want another? |
YourPriorities? |
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Thanks for these suggestions. However, there are numerous legal requirements regarding getting parental consent on behalf of underage users. Some of those requirements, such as COPPA in the United States, are particularly burdensome to comply with. At this time, GitHub does not comply with COPPA. Therefore, we are unable to permit children under 13 to have GitHub accounts, even with parental consent. @nukeop — a GitHub for lawyers would be awesome, but why not just use GitHub? Plenty of lawyers do, including GitHub's lawyers! 😁 |
What aspects are missing specifically? I have addressed some of them in necessary policy changes.
Your Priorities is an electronic democracy tool intended to discuss and manage proposals. They store their code on GitHub, GH would store its proposals on Your Priorities. |
only way to reliably get an irrevocable permanent consent while complying with COPPA. Other jurisdictions than US also have similar electronic parental consent applications. |
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This is an unacceptable invasion of privacy. Realistically whoever is under 18 and wants a Github account just makes one and starts coding right away, since there's really nothing stopping them from doing so. |
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Thank you for killing this PR. |
This will allow underages to use GitHub if consented by an adult parent or legal guardian.