Gross COPPA Violation
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN mostly cites it as a humorous or illustrative reference to an extreme COPPA penalty.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites FreshStart · 2023-06 · on “FTC Says Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers”
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?
Cites mptest · 2025-09 · on “I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens”
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]