PG-13

Over the past year,Google has started actively disabling accounts of the under-13s. This is partly because of a US legislation called the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act,which forbids sites from collecting personal information from children without parental consent. Given the complications of that,many services simply disallow children in concept,while keeping the controls lax. For instance,Facebook forbids anyone under 13 to create an account,but a consumer report in May last year revealed that there were over 7.5 million kids on the network. Now,even as they face the heat over objectionable content issues,Gmail has begun telling Indian children and pre-teens they arent welcome for a few years more and if they want to specify a different age to keep the account,they need to furnish proof of credit card or ID.

Of course,kids in that cohort are genuinely too young for email,in the sense that they are digital natives who went straight to social networks and micro-blogs,for whom email is an archaic and imperfect medium. Theyre unlikely to care.