The new age restriction option for pages suggests so

Nov 8, 2011 19:21 GMT  ·  By

Now that Google has launched Google+ Pages and is allowing anyone to create one, maybe you've tried to create one and you probably noticed a peculiar setting, enabling you to specify the age of those your page is targeting.

The default option is "Any Google+ user" but the other options are "Users 18 and older," "Users 21 and older" and "Alcohol related."

This is a bit peculiar since, so far, Google hasn't been allowing anyone under 18 years old to sign up for the social network, so restricting your page to users below 18 does not make sense.

In fact, quite a lot of people have made a lot of fuss over the fact that those under 18 were not allowed to create profiles on the site. Google hasn't exactly provided an explanation for this, it 'just is.'

Google hasn't relented on the policy and hasn't said anything about plans to do so, so the options for pages seem redundant at best.

That is, unless Google does plan to open up the site to those under 18, in which case, having the option now just prevents headaches in the future.

And that most certainly seems to be the case, again, Google hasn't said anything, but it's pretty obvious that it will allow kids, over 13 of course since that's the current US law, to sign up for the site, especially since there's nothing on Google+ that would prevent it from doing so.

As for the age restriction selector for Google+ pages, it doesn't really do much. Since the pages themselves will be public just like almost anything that's going to be posted by these pages, there's no way for Google to block anything.

However, logged in users who may be under age, may be prevent from seeing any 'interactive' features on the page, anything that requires them to be logged in.