You're almost certainly right, but I still think for legal documents this kind of argument needs to die. I'm really, really sick of being asked to be OK with agreements that give organizations significant, unnecessary levels of power simply because they say they won't misuse it. What are the consequences in place if Little League decides to misuse this data? This agreement removes any accountability or oversight from Little League's data handling.
Frankly, it's magical thinking. In the real world, organizations do corrupt things sometimes. Organizations accidentally leak data, they have bad actors, they get into conflicts and decide to stop operating in good faith. We shouldn't give those organizations blank checks to do so.
This kind of fuzzy "trust us" agreement is fine for something casual that parents are putting together, but it's not fine when it's an organization of this size. Because I guarantee that in the event of a scandal, if a Little League was ever sharing personal information with advertisers, this contract would get trotted out during the lawsuit to argue that the defendants couldn't sue. I don't believe for a second that a Little League wouldn't look at the letter of the contract in that situation rather than the "spirit" of the contract.
So even in situations where an org isn't actively trying to take advantage of you, it's harmful for contracts to have this kind of language. Often this language is genuinely only put in because some lawyer somewhere recommended it, often nobody is trying to take advantage of anyone. But even so, legal documents are not gentleperson's agreements, and we shouldn't treat them that way, we should treat them seriously.
It's OK for you to acknowledge that the agreement probably doesn't have malicious intent. It's not OK for someone to argue that not having malicious intent makes the agreement acceptable.
Indeed. And attorneys and "template documents" are the biggest culprit here. Every legal person gets a thrill writing the most evil one-sided legal document then pushes it to the company which uses it since "it comes from legal". 99% of the people just sign it since "legal" doesn't agree to changes.
I've had multiple companies/people utterly confused as to how I wouldn't sign their one-sided "standard" agreement contract.
This being HN, I figure I can make this criticism and be understood even if it breaks the rules here:
Either Little League operates on a human web of trust-- where parents show the documents to a human like you, who then signs-off on the age/residency verification, on up the chain as the Linux Kernel devs work; or, Little League requires a sophisticated digital system for accepting and verifying the documents with lots of personally identifying information in them. If it's the latter, fine-- but then that system is subject to the same scrutiny that Signal, Clubhouse, Experion, and every other digital system out there.
With that in mind, Little League's privacy policy as written is a dangerous pile of horseshit, and your rank speculation that they're probably not leveraging it the way the rest of data miners would isn't helping.
I get why you’re upset / impassioned, I am too about this in general, but I believe the person you are replying to was acting in good faith and giving a perspective most of us here do not have.
From a more pragmatic perspective this behavior discourages others, both directly and indirectly, from contributing in the future for fear of saying something wrong or incorrectly. Of course there is a balance.
That ToS is dangerous and should be changed ASAP.
If OP knows the inner workings of Little League well enough to claim that the ToS is a case of overly-broad boilerplate, OP can message someone relevant in the org to tell them to change it so it isn't as dangerous.
That doesn't address the broader problem of whether the data really is kept safe. But it at least raises the cost to someone who is considering (or already has considered) mining that data.
I have a difficult time believing that an org with a non-negligible number of participants willing to risk harm to 8 year-olds for the benefit of their 11 year-old would have zero participants willing to leverage an overly-broad ToS for personal gain.
Why not just get kids together to play baseball?
Why capital Little capital League?
Why do we have to normalize towards an organizational system?
Academically it all makes sense; our scientific truth must be rigorously vetted.
This all just feels like busy work for no gain for most people. I really don’t get the fucking point?
Is it so hard to set up a game between your kids and others as human beings? Why pomp and circumstance?
Yes. Yes, it is actually reasonably hard to coordinate 18+ kids and thier familes (thats the minimum size for two baseball teams), have an experienced adult coach them, and hire a referee (if that is judged to be necessary), coordinate field usage, advocate for local governments to set aside sports and play space and protect existing space from development.
Now are many American youth sports leagues a bit nuts about the competitive or developmental aspects? Absolutely, and baseball is one of the worst. I really want a checkbox that says "do you want your kids to play in the major leagues some day" so I can not check that and hang out with other parents just there for fun. But coordinating sports and recreation (and ensuring space and facilities for sports and recreation exist in the first place) is not a trivial exercise and is why most local governments have an entire department set aside for it. Parks and Recreation may be a funny and absurd series, but in real life those people do real work that has real benefits.
How did people coordinate this before the invention of all these digital communication devices that we now find our selves so desperately dependent on like we're stuck in The Matrix?
I think you might be referring to a time when kids could play unsupervised and before independence-building play was replaced with wall-to-wall no-trespassing signs and overseen by a system that makes sure each minor transgression is forever leveraged into multiple, life-harming punishments.
(Fewer of them, to be sure.)
It may or may not qualify as "generations".
The decades before this favored informal games. Afterward, league play dominated kid-ball.
Facetiousness aside, I'm flabbergasted that I'm reading people on HN defend these kinds of abhorrent data collection and retention polices and using the difficulties of coordinating 18 people as an excuse for them.
It's like some cyber stockholm syndrome where people feel the need to make justifications for the behaviour of malevolent entities that they have wilfully shared their data with. The requests are so unbelievably intrusive that they remind me of the Ivy League nude posture photos[1]
I give it 6-24 months before we're reading a story here about a mass data leak from Little League or something equivalent like Boy Scouts of America or whatever.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos
However, the comment I was responding to was regarding the need to have any coordination at all. It’s good and right that these organizations exist, they just don’t need to collect PII as described in the article.
You asked specifically for little leagues. The across continents coordination is done by a.) delegating rulership to local warlords b.) keeping military power strong enough to keep those you those in check. It had massive limitation in terms of what it could achieve and has zero to do with organizing of competitions for kids.
Plus, the central power would not bother to micromanage little teams. It is our culture that finds little leagues important, not theirs.
The reason why it's so formalized beyond that is that travel ball at 11-12 years old is the beginning of the pipeline to the pros. There are millions of dollars of signing bonuses waiting just a few years down the line, but you don't get drafted unless you're a high school star, and you don't get to play for the high school varsity team unless you're getting the coaching from the top-tier youth leagues.
This is pretty much the case. By age 12 or so, the local kids who have skill and interest have been identified. They are shunted out of the parks and rec leagues into travel teams and they play together up to high school. Of course there are still tryouts but if you're a freshman and unknown to the coaches, you have to be either a move-in who has been playing travel ball elsewhere, or one of the rare naturals at pitching or hitting to really get noticed at that point.
The only exception is in individual combat sports (wrestling or judo, for instance). In those cases, not only is it a safety issue, but the 'penalty' for failing to make weight is just that you have to compete in the next weight class up, not that you or your team are ejected from the competition.
European rowers (and I include British people here) are kind of shocked that the US has lightweight categories at high-school level. I suppose, though, that if people are chasing lucrative scholarships to college lightweight teams that might be an incentive...
Scholarships for men's rowing largely don't exist. There are a few schools with full varsity programs, but not many.
Women's rowing, as a scholarship activity, is a largely new thing - there was a massive increase in women's rowing in the 1990s in order to comply with federal regulations. The men's football (American, not soccer) team has 85 scholarships available - rowing is an easy way to add 20+ women's scholarships.
As for lightweights in high school, I was one. If there was no lightweight program, I likely would have stuck to XC running. No way I could compete against the typical 180lb+ heavyweight at 140lbs.
You can, if everyone trusts everyone involved, and you just want some casual fun. But beyond that...
Some of the developmental/training issues have been mentioned, as well as some allusion to safety. Also related is liability; do it enough and there are going to be injuries, some of them serious. And if you haven't planned for this, it's quite easy for someone to unexpectedly end up responsible for a huge unexpected liability.
The developmental aspect is the real reason. When you're talking about the 7/8/9 grades, the point of Little League is to get the attention of scouts for professional organizations and colleges. When you introduce millions in signing bonuses to an 18 year old or athletic scholarships, you're begging for adults to poison the well. Little League has a history of cheaters and the organization, at best, is frequently overwhelmed in dealing with them.
Can you expound on that further and provide some sources for future reading?
Sure if you just want to just show up at the park on Saturday afternoon to see who else is there and hit the ball around, you can do that. Without some structure and organization, it will never go beyond that.
Heh, I played Little League in a very small town back in 1968-69. In order to have enough teams, the league was 9, 10, 11 and 12 year olds. You had 12 year old almost men firing blazing fast balls at little 9 year old kids. Tough league.
I have a funny Little League story. My 12 year old year, I was on the worst team in the league. It was a 16 game season and we were 3 and 12. Our last game was with the undefeated team. Somehow, we played the best game of our careers and beat the undefeated team. My Mom just happened to be at the game and as was the custom, bought soda pops for all the members of the winning team (at 10 cents a bottle, a $1.50 cash outlay). She comes over to me all puzzled and asks "why are all the kids on the other team crying?". I explained how we ruined their undefeated season and she bought them all soda pops too.
That said, the end result is a pretty bad combination of things. It's a little annoying but not the end of the world when I start getting spam for batting cages after registration. It would be a whole different animal if I started getting ads for medicines based on the medical records I had uploaded to register. (Hypothetically speaking, of course; I'd never upload anything that sensitive, and I don't think Little League would ever actually do that.)
Interestingly they never asked for proof of age. I think that happens in person with the coaches, but I haven't thought about this since about a year ago and didn't really pay attention to remember exactly how that worked.
- if you don’t need it, don’t ask for it
- if you need it, limit the scope to only the needed use cases
- if your request is overly broad & is written in a fashion that requires me to sound like I’m signing away my privacy, I gonna think you have bad intentions and that makes me not trust you
We run in circles avoiding saying that the organization should just do what is required to serve the people it was formed to serve, it's really something.
If the parent were signing up to coach, I could understand. But just to have a kid in the league. I don't get it.
I understand that some of the stuff required for this person to get their kid involved in Little League seemed over the top, but let’s not downplay the risks of involving adult coaches and volunteers without checks or turn a blind eye to what has happened in the past.
Then there's the hours of online "Safe Sport" training, every year, plus you become a "mandatory reporter" for any kind of abuse, neglect, etc. and that also makes people nervous. So it's just more reasons for people to decline to help.
Worse, it's a pipelined thing. If you're not already one of the best kids in your area by the time you get to high school, you won't get any playing time, so you won't get scouted. If you aren't one of the best kids in your area by the time you get to travel-ball age, you won't get any playing time, so you won't get the experience to be able to make the high school team. If you don't get on (or fall off of) the fast track, you have absolutely no shot.
Undrafted free agents sometimes make it to the NFL, and walk-ons at the college level aren't unheard of. You can learn basketball up to an NBA level relatively late, so long as you're one of the incredibly few people with the genetics to make that an option. But baseball is so dependent on ingrained muscle-memory and top coaching that you absolutely cannot start playing baseball at a high level late and hope to compete. And as long as there's money in it at the end of the pipe, there will be competition at the beginning of the pipe.
At some point, society decided that we weren't going to do that any more, even though it meant that the "castrato" parts in operas could no longer be properly sung (there was near-universal agreement that the purity and power of a castrato's voice could not be matched by anything else).
Now, we're not castrating these kids, but we are sending a lot of them into adulthood with physical problems (fucked-up joints, e.g.) and a socially-impoverished childhood.
Maybe accepting a slightly-lower baseline level of professional baseball skill would be a reasonable tradeoff to avoid that?
Edit: the same holds true for gymnastics, tennis, etc., of course -- any sport that requires that level of dedication from a young child. I don't mean to drag baseball in specific.
> At some point, society decided that we weren't going to do that any more, even though it meant that the "castrato" parts in operas could no longer be properly sung
Well, castrating kids to preserve their high voices is out, but castrating kids is very much back in.
I don't want my kids birth certs sitting on some random server.
Instead when necessary I use copies of their passports or school documents.
Whatever it might "just" be, these are the rights they claim. If it was "just" something benign, they could claim those rights. That's what you make legal write those documents for (and if you don't have one to write those documents, you shouldn't be making them at all).
The fact that they have claimed them and still have them means they feel like they might use those rights. That makes it evil.
I think it’s lazy and bad form to ask for extremely broad catch-all consents to personal data usage, which basically become meaningless as a result. Those remind me of a famous “meme-ified” scene from Parks and Recreation where Ron shows a homemade ‘permit’ to an inspector that says: “I can do whatever I want. /s/ Ron.”
At least in the EU there’s the GDPR mandating that consent be specific and freely given. If only data collecting organisations would stop focussing so much on the cookie consent nag screens and take their compliance with the rest of the GDPR equally serious...
Size/strength and emotional maturity might be, age is at best a very loose proxy for those which fails quite often.
How hard is it though to make it clear:
(1) how this information will be handled (2) how it will be stored/secured (3) when it will be deleted
.. separately from your sharing of data terms. They almost certainly have no intention of sharing that information with marketers or sponsors - it would be quite easy to make that clear.
I also think we’ll see handlers take privacy a lot more seriously now that the understanding of GDPR is trickling through these systems.
Sensitive data is still treated as a juicy little bonus for marketing departments instead of the radioactive plutonium that it is.
I was on a little league board. In my state, we had pretty strict background check requirements, and those providers were the “trusted partners” that were given sensitive information. Now, little league volunteers are mandated reporters in New York, so the government gets information for training enrollment.
The school enrollment information was used for eligibility... the eligibility requirement was to live or go to school in the territory. It frequently came up for kids in private school outside the zone or kids in shared custody arrangements. There are many edge cases, especially with shared custody, foster or arrangements where “easy” forms of required information just isn’t available for various reasons. Most “nuclear” families provided a birth certificate and any letter from a utility, bank or tax bill.
Age is very important for leveling kids appropriately and keeping them safe, which is why birth certificates are required — parents are insane and go to extreme lengths (I personally encountered forged documents, parents who delayed entry into kindergarten to age 6, bogus documents from siblings or cousins, etc) to try to let older kids play in younger levels. It’s a hazard for an 11 year old to pitch or hit against 8 year olds. Little League is used as a way for folks to get kids into elite travel teams, etc.
Marketing stuff was totally different and may vary by league. We wanted all communications to our folks to go through and be approved by us. “Bob the plumber” could hand out flyers, get an ad or have a blurb in an email campaign. The big companies (currently GM, Gatorade, Honda in my region) just push materials down and use contests to get personal data.