Meta has reached a settlement with nearly every US state and agreed to establish safeguards for teenage users, promising to introduce curfews, time limits, and tighter parental controls.
The agreement ends a major lawsuit brought by California and 28 other US states, which accused Meta of deliberately designing addictive products that harmed young people.
Under the agreement, the tech giant will pay up to USD18 billion over 10 years, subject to court approval. The money will be divided among the states.
The court also requires Meta to implement protections including daily usage limits, blocks on nighttime use, stopping notifications during school, and bans on plastic surgery fillers.
The problem lies with age verification
The settlement has also given Meta one year to identify users aged 13 to 17 years old in the participating states and territories.
Teen accounts will have daily usage limits and restrictions on nighttime use switched on by default, while parents have the ability to loosen some of those controls.
But the problem is that Meta cannot simply identify teenagers. In order to enforce the rules, it will have to establish the age of users generally – including adults.
Anyone who does not complete the company’s age verification process within 14 days could be subjected to the same restrictions as a teenager.
How will Meta implement the safeguards?
To implement the protections, the company may use government identification, selfies, or other forms of age verification.
But these methods come with new challenges, as privacy advocates warned that such methods could compromise anonymity and increase people’s exposure to data breaches and government data requests.
The loophole
Even if Meta can identify teenage users, how can the company assure that the user is actually the parent?
This could create another loophole in the implementation, as teenagers repeatedly find ways around online restrictions.
“Teens are notorious for finding workarounds to these types of rules,” said social media industry expert Jasmine Enberg.
This means that even with a technically successful age-verification system, it may not guarantee that teenagers remain within the restrictions imposed on their accounts.
With this settlement, Meta is under serious challenge to implement these changes as it seeks to balance stronger protections for young users while ensuring that the wider user base still enjoy its privacy and freedom.
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Ciara Mina 
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Jheruleene Anne Ramos