I’m not strictly allergic to proving that I live in a certain place, so long as the evidence is securely deleted afterward. I’m very opposed to the idea that they can share all of those records with any of their partners or sponsors as they see fit. For example, “proof of residency 3” includes financial or medical records. Suppose that Large Corporation donates $1,000 to Little League. Per the privacy policy, Little League could share those financial or medical records with them. Nuts to that.
I think this is just poorly written, or written to fit all use cases. There is a lot behind little league, and it’s not obvious until you get into it.
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.
> I think this is just poorly written, or written to fit all use cases.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
So while this is pretty accurate I think the last part could be said more nicely.
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.
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.
It's typical self-righteous tech elitest drivel. What's not wrong with it? About the only thing missing is a reference to how anyone with two braincells uses Brave browser and buys bitcoin.
On issues of information privacy, I think that most people here are likely to be informed enough to form opinions that they can back with reasoning, as was done here. And the facts are that the policy that Little League has does not have to be in place.
>> Is it so hard to set up a game between your kids and others?
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.
> 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.
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.
Sports leagues have been a thing for generations, so it's worth noting that the answer to "What did you do before all this digital stuff" isn't "kids just did their own thing" -- they still organized leagues.
Pen and paper, the way most organizing was done before the digital age. You went to a community center, signed your kids up. Can you imagine organizing 18 kids without all these devices? Little League has been around since 1939, the need for a coordinating organization isn't a recent change.
And that’s pretty much how it’s done in the LL my kid played in a few years ago. Parents show up to a local pizza place during a registration day. They bring the filled out paper enrollment form, the kid tries on some jerseys for size, and then pay the fee. Congrats, Johnny (or Jane) is signed up for LL.
I read in a history book that human beings managed to coordinate entire empires that stretched across continents with out digital electronics.
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.
To be clear, I’m not defending the collection of the data; that’s stupid, and is a good example why there should legislative minimum fines for data breaches and bond requirements to process certain types of data, as well as standardized privacy policies and regulation
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.
> I read in a history book that human beings managed to coordinate entire empires that stretched across continents with out digital electronics.
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.
You absolutely can find recreational leagues that are less rigorous - although for safety reasons they'll still tend to be particular about ages. Baseball is a relatively dangerous sport if there's a massive imbalance. It's important that pitch speed, bat speed, reaction times, and overall mass scale up smoothly and roughly uniformly.
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.
> 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.
Why not cover the safety aspect with simple height and or weight ranges like boxing etc? That seems like it would work better and is much easier to check.
Yeah, weight classes in kids' sports are a terrible idea.
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...
* 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.
> Why not just get kids together to play baseball?
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.
Let's be honest. Safety and liability issue is a convenient excuse and in reality, a small part of the reason.
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.
Little League is a very US institution, but even in places with socialized healthcare there are non-medical costs of injuries and potential liability attached to them, and anyway, while universal coverage is common outside of the US, many nations acheive it without socialized medicine.
The national league organizations do a lot of good things. I would say that most importantly they have standardized coaching education, e.g. what should kids be learning at each age level. Then locally you have clubs and leagues that operate to schedule games and do all the legwork of reserving time on fields for games and practices, raising funds to pay for it, handling communication with parents, etc.
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.
> It’s a hazard for an 11 year old to pitch or hit against 8 year olds.
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.
I personally think you're right: it was written overly broadly and allows for things that Little League would never do in practice. I think they're a good organization and didn't mean any evil when they set this up.
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 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
The problem with this "they don't intend to use this overly-broad power in that way" line of thinking is that, even if you could be completely assured that it is true, there is no telling who will come into power in the future. You don't leave a gun laying around in the open.
The privacy policy could easily be that PII will only be used where required by law.
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.
Yes thanks to Larry Nassir and Jerry Sandusky every volunteer parent on every youth sports club is seen as a potential pedophile. Mandatory background checks, mandatory training on bullying, harassment, hazing, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and sexual misconduct is now required. It has really made it much more difficult for leagues to get volunteers because though many parents want to help, most don't want to have to submit to this level of scrutiny and demands on their time.
It’s much more widespread than just those two cases. I know that the Scottish FA recently issued a report into historic abuse and it seems a few clubs had problems over the years. I imagine that this is not something limited to these few clubs in this one small country, and that it’s happened this way over the world.
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.
Is it really that bad? From what I remember, in Canada my vulnerable sector check was as simple as going to a location, showing my drivers license and giving basic contact info, and waiting a few minutes while they query a few databases. I’m told it gets slightly more complicated if you share a name and birthday with somebody convicted of a serious crime, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.
The background check is pretty much that -- it's online and quick, but you have to submit Driver's License #, SS#, DOB, everything that makes people nervous online. And in my experience, the form was a classic ASP page that looked like it had been developed in 1998. I didn't try any SQL injection tricks or anything, but it didn't inspire confidence. In sum, it's not so much the background check itself I object to, it's the wondering about the third parties that get the information.
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.
For baseball, you'd have to do a whole lot more than that. Most top baseball prospects don't go to college at all - they get signed straight out of high school. Kids are getting signed for millions of dollars at age 17 or 18, and baseball is more a skill than a sport. The stakes are ridiculously high: it's a life-changing amount of money, there are only a few spots available (compared to the number of kids who play baseball), and the skill ceiling is basically nonexistent.
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.
It used to be considered acceptable to find young boys with good voices and castrate them so their voices would never change.
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.
> It used to be considered acceptable to find young boys with good voices and castrate them so their voices would never change.
> 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 never give out birth certificates for my kids. Birth certificates are foundational documents for identity theft with a lot of personal information organized on one page.
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.
You’ve just written an excellent foundation for a privacy policy. It clearly explains most of what data you need and what you’ll use it for - that’s exactly the fundamentals of a good privacy policy. Add some stuff on where/how you store and secure it, when you delete it, and who to contact to update/delete info or complain, and you’re 99% done.
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...
To cut to the crux of it, the extensive document requirements are almost certainly due exclusively to child protection requirements that are not obvious to the rest of us as we’re not aware of the safeguards in place in the background. Cool. I’d be concerned if they weren’t taking those matters seriously.
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'd be OK with this if "trusted sponsor" meant Bob's Plumbing, and Bob's the second baseman's father who bought the team's uniforms. Sure, let Bob have my email so he can pitch me a tankless water heater. But it's as likely that they're remote conglomerates selling horrible products that damage our kids' health and shorten their lives, like Coca-Cola. And we're handing them a sheaf of vectors to insert their promotional material into our every crevice.
I'm not even OK with this. I have very little trust in the average small business' ability to protect my information, on a technical level. I have more trust in their desire to protect my information - but that's not sufficient by itself.
Requiring three separate factors of proof sounds to me like a way for that organization to implicitly filter out "undesirable" kids who may not have the most stable home life.
On the face of it, it is certainly odd that so much information would be required as proof of residence. On the other side, I suspect there is a reason for that, namely, someone ruined it for the rest by trying to cheat. Some parents take kids sports very seriously and I have no doubt they would go to insane lengths to skirt any residency rules in place.
(Wikipedia) Little League Baseball and Softball is a 501 nonprofit organization based in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, United States, that organizes LOCAL YOUTH baseball and softball leagues throughout the United States and the rest of the world. (caps are mine)
I hear ya- we just had to go through this whole process and thought it absolutely ridiculous, but didn’t feel had much choice since we’d like our kids to be able to play.
That's exactly where I'm at. I really, really didn't want to do this, but if I don't then my kid can't be on a team with his friends. That's a crummy deal.
The problem with web forms is that they don't allow to discuss ambiguities - like, what if a parent can't for some reason provide required information.
So it's plausible that if such a form doesn't contain "other" option, then any data submitted should be as good as any other.
I connect the dots here historically, back to Feudal times for example, with mandatory military service to the local Boss. Cultures that are ok with this basically comply with the reporting requirements on their male children, cultures that are against this social form, object and do not comply, doing other things with childhood besides training in teams with numbers on each back. I claim that modern human social landscapes are filled with examples of both sorts of groups.
On the extremes may be people who are not self-aware enough to even think about the implications of compliance, and on the other, social privilege or social isolation, to escape compliance. Without the actual consequences of war in our lifetime (in the USA), people have a lot less reason to object, and they generally don't (sheeple-theory).
Personally, I strongly object to this practice, and am strongly against the "surveillance capitalism" trend overall.
Speaking as someone who is has done this in their career, the data trove here would be extremely easy to monetize. No Hedge fund / Fintech company would ever turn this kinda data down the yearly licensing fee would def be in the millions. Not saying that they are doing this now but remember that once you submit this data that's going to be with LL for a long time. If they run into some situation in a few years and find this desirable, you're data is going to be part of the package.
What they really should be doing is outsourcing this to another company that is specifically dedicated to identity verification (like Personia.io) and NOT collect any of the underlying documentation. But why the hell would they do that when there's so much future upside they would be giving up?
My guess would be that they haven't outsourced it because it would've been more difficult to go through the acquisition process than to simply an in house dev to build an upload form and do manual verification on the uploaded documents.
If that is the case, then I'd be less worried about Little League selling children's personal data, and more concerned that it's all sitting unencrypted in an S3 bucket.
I was in Little League around 10 years ago and my parents are certain it was them who sold our info (SSN included) to advertisers since we got all sorts of junk mail and email all the time right after I joined. I'm surprised they're still doing it nowadays.
This type of crap makes me so, so mad. I don't have specific examples right now, but I find it increasingly common to be asked for personal information from the most obscure sources. Ordinarily, I can choose to either not sign up or choose a different option. But with something like the only sports league in town, what's a parents supposed to do? So frustrating.
Love the comment from throwawaygulf to submit fake data. Brilliant!
Did you talk to your classmates and organize your classmates to take this to the Dean?
Even just 5 people getting up in the middle of the class, heading straight to the dean's office and demanding to know why we are being forced to give our information to Microsoft needlessly would have likely remedied your situation that same day.
If there is serious discontent in the class, forcing the dean to meet with you/your classmates immediately is a solid power move that worked for myself and my friends that went to other institutions. Show them how their professors fucked up and demand they fix it, its not the student's fault that they are teaching a crummy curriculum.
Additionally, post-graduation when they sell your contact information ensure you document who contacted you using the information they sold, and escalate it with the Faculty. Framing it as data theft from the institution is a solid way to escalate to the president of your university, then you can harangue them about their terrible business practices.
I was asked for my email while paying at a sports store. I declined. The sales person was confused as to what to do next since "the system" wanted an email address. I asked her if she wants to sell me those products or not? Turns out the system works without an email address too. Who would have though?
I live in Germany, where people are required to register their official address. In return they get a registration certificate they can use in situations like this.
It's a common source of frustration for foreigners, because temporary places rarely let you register, lest you become a tenant with full rights. It's also possible not to have a static address if you study or travel abroad.
Yet without an official address your residence permit is invalid, and your health insurance and bank account can be terminated too.
There's also a catch 22 where you need an official address to get a bank account to get a credit check to get your first apartment. You also need to register your address to get a tax ID for your employer to pay you, but it's hard to find an apartment without a job.
Unfortunately, the system is designed by local people with a house and a job. It frequently fails to account for such edge cases.
Is “Little League” a national organisation? I always assumed it just meant a kids baseball game and that would be something run by the local community. If it’s the former...why does such an organisation even need to exist?
I also had always assumed that Little League was just local kids baseball, but it's a big organization that goes back to 1939. It has millions of members, its own official rules, rating system, World Series, board of directors, TV partners, and museum. It even has a federal charter in US law.[1] It's a bit alarming to discover that something you thought was casual turns out to be a giant organization.
There are a lot of local kids' baseball leagues that aren't Little League, it's worth mentioning.
The one I played in when I was a kid was called "(Local Area Name) Baseball for Boys" (yeah, it was a while ago).
Probably the people running Little League have all kinds of lucrative deals going on, as is the norm with "non-profits".
According to the article linked below, in 2012 Little League had revenue of almost $25 million and assets of more than $85 million, and the CEO raked in $430,000 per year in salary.
One f the reasons I hate sports that rely on governing bodies so much. it is not about the sport or the athletes, i is just about the functionaries ego, power and influence. Worst are, of course, the olympic sports and commiees, immediately followed by soccer.
Inever understood why I need a national olympic association to do wrestling, or the FIFA to play soccer. On the other hand, in martial arts (competitive, not traditional), you see the same thing all the time. Kickboxing assoiations springing up because one guy doesn't like the other guy. And because he wants to be able to regulate equipment, that he sells himself. Luckily, you get away ignoring that. Nobody cares if you are part of various associations. They just look at you strangely when you show up with other assiciation's ID cards.
In the semi-pro segment it gets ugly so. With the assiciation setting, and judging, fights you have to play ball or you will loose. Luckily, kids are treated very kindly.
Same question here. I guess I was never too deep in local baseball growing up, but I played on a team in a local league that did 'state' finals (but nothing national). There were also 'select' clubs that I played on a couple years before deciding to focus on volleyball going into high school, but AFAICR they weren't affiliated with any national organization.
Do you know if this is still a thing for California residents under the CCPA?
I recently received a standard letter from my financial institution around data sharing – the usual "we are going to share your data with our partners, please send back this physical letter in order to opt out".
There was a little footer saying that for CA residents, the default is opt-out, and that you need to send a letter to opt-in, which is incredible.
Don't always assume bad intent with these sports leagues. I helped my son's tackle football league out with various organizational and website tasks because they didn't have anybody on the board that understood it well. Some parents are just better suited to teaching tackling technique than they are creating a web form that makes sense. I'm guessing that OP's league might be sponsored by the city and the city Parks & Rec staff had some city attorney come up either the requirements for the form and the T&Cs, and I'm guessing that this attorney has no kids in the program and has no internet security experience, either.
Gotcha. I didn't realize LL was a big, national org when I wrote that comment. Knowing this now, my guess is that this form was created at the behest of some big law firm they retained to do this kind of stuff and that these attorneys have no kids in sports. No actual sports parent would want to subject anybody to such insanity.
Why is there any bureaucracy to Little League in the first place, though? Like why do we need to be doing any of this?
> To sign kids up for our city’s Little League baseball program, you have to prove that they’re residents, which is reasonable.
I don't really get that. What are we scared of here? People coming over the border to steal Little League coaching for their children? Is that a major concern somewhere?
> What are we scared of here? People coming over the border to steal Little League coaching for their children?
Yes, exactly this. It happens. It really does. In all sports. And not just parents seeking out "good" teams and coaches, but coaches recruiting kids to play. It gets to the point where parents put their kids in online schools, or private schools operated by a travel sports organization, so that they can get more practice time and more games.
Here’s what happens when you don’t have residency rules:
Suppose you have suburb A next to suburb B. B has an awesome Little League local organization, but A’s is awful. Parents from A all send their kids to play ball in B. The problem is that B’s resources are finite, too: there are only so many baseball fields available for practice at a time, or batting practice cages, etc. And since the kids from A that are coming over tend to be the more skilled ones, if B has too many kids apply than they have the resources, they’ll likely end up dropping the kids who actually live in B.
This is much, much more likely than you’d expect if you’ve never been directly involved with kids’ sports. You’d be amazed how many parents think their kid would be the next MLB rookie-of-the-year.
Why have it by residency then? Try out for a team, if you don’t get on it, try out for another one. It’s just kids playing ball, I don’t understand the high stakes. We used to just play pick up games in the park and that was fun too. No birth certificate required! Why is little league so serious?
A lot of the older kids take themselves to practice. My kid rode his bike to the park not far from our house. In general, it’s wonderful that this is an option. I’d hate it if he had to play in another city just because the parents from that city were all sending their kids here instead.
Little League is supposed to be a recreational league. I mean, they still treat it seriously and work hard to teach the kids good skills, but ultimately it should be open to any kid who wants to play. Keeping it local makes this a lot more possible.
I’m OK with the rules that Little League is trying to enforce. It’s just that I don’t like the mechanism by which they’re enforcing them.
> It’s just kids playing ball, I don’t understand the high stakes. We used to just play pick up games in the park and that was fun too. No birth certificate required! Why is little league so serious?
Dont be facetious. It is competitive league for little kids. It is not just kids playing sport for fun, as you said you need no organization for that. But, if what you want is competitions, coaches and performance, then you need an organized league.
It is different thing for kids/parents/families that are into that different competitive thing. Its existence is not preventing you to play ball with your own kids and their friends in park.
LL is bound to residency for several specific reasons but all geared towards the goal of fair play.
Throughout any city there are only so many public baseball fields (all run by the city). A set of fields covers so many square miles and a league set by residency gets access only to those fields in their close vicinity. Obviously you will have fields in poor areas as well as upper class areas, and from experience, the condition of those fields can vary widely. Naturally without boundary restrictions everyone would be signing up only to the nicest area leagues, leaving the poor ones to falter and those parks rundown even more.
Having a "try-out" system for kids (6-12) doesn't work for a wide variety of reasons.
Obvious one is safety. Mixing ages is dangerous and a try-out system would encourage it due to size of player pools. Doesn't matter how good a 7 year old, he cannot compare to a 12 year old. The worst 12 year old is still good enough to really injure a 7 year (or 8/9). At 46' (LL pitching distance)it has just about reached my ADULT limit of reaction time on a few occasion tossing to a 12 year old batter.
Other reason would be lack of balance in the teams and the leagues. You'd end up with super teams as some teams become loaded with talent (add in the above factor of no residency and you'd have the loaded super teams end up in the nicest areas) and cut those kids not good enough (ending up in the poor areas to play). The not good enough kids would have huge blow to their esteem as well as the fun of playing baseball as they would routinely not make a few try-outs each season and falter down to the bad teams. Those bad teams would eventually play the super teams and have no chance. Not fun to be part of losing all the time while the better kids always win and get to play in nicest parks.
For those who don't have kids and experienced youth sports, many of the answers to your questions might not be obvious. It isn't "just kids playing ball". You do that with your group of friends. Playing for LL you are getting an organization that works hard at providing an organized, equal and fun baseball experience with your surrounding communities. They have the criteria in place that they do to try and deal with the many chances of having overzealous parents and coaches cheat/manipulate and ruin the experience for kids and parents.
What the OP brought up and what they are doing with the data IS a concern though. One I never thought about when I signed my son up. It is SAD world we are in IMO in which data is worth THAT much that it is becoming the norm for companies to make a lot of extra money in harvesting it. Something has to be done about this. It is everywhere now it seems. From a simple app installed on my phone to Even Little League is now a possible data theft/ Broker threat willing to sell your info or lose it in a hack?
This is a great example for why I think these sorts of data sharing agreements need to just be made completely illegal. Somebody will come around and say "well, if you don't like it, nobody is forcing you, you can just go somewhere else". And that might work for something like a blogging platform where there is so much competition and very few barriers to entry. But for a huge number of things, there are no alternatives, or the only alternatives are also operating in the same way.
Like any serious hobby, people are people and do stupid shit.
You know how nerds kill each other about systemd, vi vs emacs, C vs Rust? Crazy parents will pull together a group of 11 year olds from 30 miles away to beat your 8/9 year old to get into a tournament.
I've been involved in various baseball and softball leagues in two different states, and I 100% vouch for every word of the above. Anyone who's been involved with little kid sports knows this is utterly plausible and not even slightly exaggerated.
Growing up, we even saw some of this behavior in park district youth softball, which had no tournaments, tiers or scouts and even had a mission statement of not being a competitive environment.
Let’s suppose all these things are true. So what? It’s kids playing ball. They’re just having fun regardless. I’m not seeing any reasons to collect all this intrusive personal info here, just excuses.
You occasionally hear about faked birth certificates being used to get over age players or foreigners (Cubans) on a team. There is enough money at stake for these kids at the national level for a few people to try it. Cheating is almost minigame inside of baseball at this point.
I don’t know if requiring three forms of ID/residency is the right solution, but I at least understand the motivation. They are probably operating under the assumption that it’s harder to fake three government documents than it is to fake one. It’s definitely more time consuming and expensive, and that alone will deter some cheaters.
> They are probably operating under the assumption that it’s harder to fake three government documents than it is to fake one.
While there are government documents in all three categories, none of the categories requires government documents. Or documents which have much verification behind them.
You could, but it would be a real mess if a state champion team got checked before a national level tournament and the league found out they had ineligible players that they used to qualify for the tournament. You could just kick those individual kids out, but who’s to say that the team would have qualified without them? You could DQ the whole team, but that is going to remove honest kids that had nothing to do with the cheating, and probably would have played for a non-cheating team if given the choice. Plus, if you DQ the whole team, what is the best way to find a replacement or should you just give their first opponent a bye? Once you start thinking about how to handle cheaters that make it most of the way through the season, you realize that it’s way simpler to catch them during registration so you’ll have fewer tough decisions to make later on.
I don’t support collecting a treasure trove of personal information, but I do support fairness in sports and there is probably a “correct” solution to this problem if the right people put their minds to it.
I played soccer in HS. There were rumors of aspiring players parents renting apartments in different districts to make them eligible for a certain league or district.
I'm guessing this takes aim at parents who are trying to easily forge eligibility of their child.
Yeah but: I volunteered in a High School in East Oakland a couple of decades back - the school football team won the state championship, people were so proud, then they were disqualified because their star player was living in a car with his mom .... didn't have a fixed Oakland address even though he lived there.
Some people don't have the luxury of an address, much less 3 forms of address .... but every kid should be able to play Little League, or school sports etc etc and any system that doesn't go out of its way to allow this is fundamentally broken
For sure. Out of curiosity, do you know of a good compromise that would allow the kid to play while still keeping the rules mostly in place for other kids?
That last one seems to be the hard part to solve. I totally agree about the need for flexibility though. It would break my heart to see a kid disqualified for the reasons you gave.
I'm reminded of the scene in The Politician where they aren't letting a high school student vote for student body president because she doesn't have her school ID on her by saying "if we let anyone vote, they would just bus in kids from other schools". Feels like about the same level of importance.
I suppose you could theoretically have all the best players apply for the league in one area to try and game the system to have the best team for the little league world series, the horror!
I think the real problem comes when one area has a better run organization than neighboring areas. Then parents from the neighboring areas flood the registration and local kids end up getting cut from the team. That's the sort of thing I think Little League's trying to prevent.
Are that many parents really going to have a strong enough preference between league options to forge a document? The 3 different residency proofs seems a bit wild, though I guess based on some other comments here, perhaps needed lol
Yes, absolutely. Of kids’ sports parents, about 98% are there to enjoy time with their kid and hope they pick up some teamwork skills. The rest are convinced that their kid is the best in the state and destined for pro sports, and will do anything they can to make that happen (even if said kid doesn’t really want it).
The percentage of jerks is small, but given the number of children on organized teams it can add up.
I've been through this application process; I consider it a form of abuse and I'm sure it drives some people away from participation. And then they beg you to volunteer but to do so you have to provide tons more information to prove you're not a child molester.
Anyway I think it's all so they don't get to the final competitions and Little League World Series, only to find out they have to disqualify some team for having an out-of-district player. But maybe it would work almost as well to check only the winning team, after the series, and if they've committed fraud, the other team wins.
Similar things happen with other third party. Got a funny looking "secure" message from a vendor via VirTru - WTF? Another is obligating me into a check service by Deluxe.
Sometimes your risk exposure is just the second party (Little League) but, with the explosion of SaaS it's like each of my vendors obligates me to get accounts at two more! Spreading my PII far and wide.
Atleast for emails, provide one like marketingcunts1984+forlittleleague@gmail.com. Junk emails will go to that and you will know which companies they are selling your email id to. The warm feeling from a little rubbing it in will be a bonus.
Didn’t see it mentioned anywhere - this might be in response to a recent scandal where the US champions were found to be using players from outside their district and were stripped from their title.
Was forced to install and register for the Spond app for my kid's basketball team. Was very uncomfortable with the amount of personal information it forced me to enter.
I dont really understand the angle with the "kids sport apps" thing. Is there some reason why they need all of this information on us, or are they using kids sport as a lever to force us to share more than we otherwise would?
I did not think that simple municipal sports would be taken in by data collection contracts. But it does sound like that is what happened.
Having been a victim of "sports dad turned coach" while growing up, pretty much every team and league, I cannot be surprised that a group of them decided your data was fair game.
Yes it is unacceptable. Are you sure you should entrust your child to these people?
If they can misuse the data, THEY WILL. Simple as that.
If you don't want to be abused, then don't take the benefit. Instead there's, boating, fishing, hiking, camping, zoos, amusement parks, and sports at school. wrestling is much better than baseball for building fitness and confidence. Soccer is great, so is track and field. Martial arts are good, too, especially Ju Jitsu.
You have options. Check them out before you sign anything.
I'm just starting to forge documents for this garbage. School records? Easy, download them, change my address to one a few miles away in the same city, change a few numbers of my SSN, etc. Same goes for utility bills, financial records, etc.
Fuck the data miners. The isn't even criminal to do because I'm not defrauding anyone. The address is still one in my city. They never do any actual verification so it always works.
An alternative is to redact any unnecessary information. More people should know/do this. Proof of residency should only require state or zip code. Send in a DL with everything but your name and state blacked out. If they push back, then they will be forced to justify why they need the other info. Remember they rely on your league fees to exist.
Much better to push back directly than to cry foul/play a victim/complain. Sovereign individual and all that. Yet I see a lot of the latter on this forum.
Much better to not push back directly and to cry foul/play a victim/complain anonymously unless you want to draw attention to yourself, get banned, and make getting unbanned a second part-time job.
> they will be forced to justify why they need the other info.
This is a fantasy. Pushing to this extent is not putting your kid into Little League, it's making arguing with Little League a lifestyle and personality. You really have to desire the warm glow of finding out that they've changed their policies long after your kid had to find something else to do because he/she never spent a second in Little League.
I think it's at least as useful to cry foul so that more people learn about it than to expect everyone to start appropriately redacting their information. You and I might do that, but a huge number of people wouldn't bother.
More practically, if you get caught then your kid probably gets banned from the league. This might be pretty hard to explain to a younger child in terms that would make them appreciate that you're doing it for the right reasons.
This can and does come up when, say, you have a team for 10 year olds and one of the kids looks like they drove themselves to practice. A coach can challenge the other team’s paperwork, in which case the challenged coach digs it out and everyone looks at the evidence. If it seems to be faked and the umpire agrees, the cheating team forfeits, and the kid’s parents (and possibly the coach if they were in on it) can be banned.
No, Little League doesn’t do a top secret clearance check on every player. Individual players may be checked if it’s believed they’re cheating though.
>Not really, unintentional and/or harmless lies wouldn't be fraud.
Yes really. Intentional or unintentional lies to anyone would be considered fraud if we go by your ideas.
>Could you elaborate? What does fraud mean according to you?
It's not what it means according to me, it's the definition according to the law: "with intent to defraud". Changing or redacting documents without the intention of defrauding is by definition not fraud. QED.
This service is fundamentally broken. You call them on the phone and someone who seems to be located in an overseas call center asks you about your credit history. If the information on his screen does not match the information you provide, you fail identity verification. If you try to escalate they instruct you to photocopy your driver license and social security card and mail them the photocopy.
Source, tried to get electricity in Tampa, Florida, after leaving the military. Was denied because TECO only was willing to “verify” my identity through Experian, and Experian <see above>.
This sounds like a good problem to solve.
Give me your address, and if someone asks, and you are ok with, i can verify you live in said (country/county/city) but not tell the exact location.
Obviously, there is a problem of trust in the first place to solve, but i fee like this sort of data escrow could be useful to a lot of people.
People complain about data harvesting (and I don't want mine harvested either) but would would also balk at paying the "true" cost of some things if the data being sold subsidy was removed.
Can you show some evidence that large scale data collection has been part of Little League since 1939 and pricing is based on that?
Longer: People love to stand up this false dichotomy between accepting massive individual data collection or not having advertising at all. When, in fact, advertising existed for thousands of years without it and was already a huge lucrative industry.
> Paid social networks have failed to gain traction because most people don't want to pay $10 a year.
Is there an option where I get to pay $10 a year in already popular social networks and they guaranteed my privacy? Maybe then we could start demanding better quality.
> People will give up their shopping privacy for extra discounts the the super market.
Some will. Even then, they might buy some things in cash. They get to choose.
> People buy cheap TVs that send data on what they watch which is then sold.
I was not aware of that, is it informed in the tv packaging in a way a grandma can understand it?
I’m not strictly allergic to proving that I live in a certain place, so long as the evidence is securely deleted afterward. I’m very opposed to the idea that they can share all of those records with any of their partners or sponsors as they see fit. For example, “proof of residency 3” includes financial or medical records. Suppose that Large Corporation donates $1,000 to Little League. Per the privacy policy, Little League could share those financial or medical records with them. Nuts to that.