The social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, including their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing
That gives us a world where people can’t use social media anonymously, which has problematic implications for privacy and free expression for those whose governments do not guarantee that right.
It does not absolve Meta from not doing due diligence. They have means to make an effort at it and plenty money to hire some experts. Kids under 13 upload their photos to FB publically and would likely be spotted as at least underage in normal conversation if Meta rep reached out to them. They could require reports to come from verified users and disregard reports from users with bad track record.
There’s still a difference between only the provider having your identity vs your identity being public (which is something Facebook’s real name policy mandates).
For age verification specifically, they are supposed to just set a “verified” flag in their database and remove the rest of the data within some amount of time (not more than a month I think).
I wouldn’t trust some random nobody to do this, but big companies should have processes that comply with privacy laws.
That gives us a world where people can’t use social media anonymously, which has problematic implications for privacy and free expression for those whose governments do not guarantee that right.
It does not absolve Meta from not doing due diligence. They have means to make an effort at it and plenty money to hire some experts. Kids under 13 upload their photos to FB publically and would likely be spotted as at least underage in normal conversation if Meta rep reached out to them. They could require reports to come from verified users and disregard reports from users with bad track record.
There’s still a difference between only the provider having your identity vs your identity being public (which is something Facebook’s real name policy mandates).
Given the frequency of user data leaks pretty much everywhere, nah, practically no difference there.
For age verification specifically, they are supposed to just set a “verified” flag in their database and remove the rest of the data within some amount of time (not more than a month I think).
I wouldn’t trust some random nobody to do this, but big companies should have processes that comply with privacy laws.