this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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because it's all part of a larger project to collect usable data. you can't force standards, but you can force laws.
if you build a standard and no one follows it. then it's wasted time and money. Meta, Google and Microsoft all have a vested interest in user data. more so with law enforcement buying it in bulk to build identity profiles of /individuals/.
if tomorrow they got added to the law to store and transmit a string of your government ID, would you be more resistant?
the issue is, VPNs hide your ISPs assigned IP. till now there has been a higher difficulty in differentiating traffic from the same IP with similar metadata. the more user specific metadata that's added, the easier it is to differentiate devices and users.
this makes targeting specific devices with malware for spying significantly easier. at the very least.
but at a bigger point of view, it gives provable cause because the way the law is written implies every user that installs the OS becomes a OS distributor and every user is a minor by definition, even if the API flag says otherwise.
I recommend you read that again and if the words "probable cause" don't come to mind you don't understand the risk of a "minor" identifying as a adult.
Google, Microsoft, and Apple also already account for the vast majority of desktop OS installations
And you think that the data they get being "is an adult" or "is a child we're not allowed to collect data on", per the API part of the specification is useful for that?
If Microsoft and Google are also angling for this why is it only meta lobbying?
I think meta has some scheme to profit from this stuff, possibly also at the expense of Google, Microsoft, Apple in addition to consumers.