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At Meta, millions of underage users were an 'open secret,' show court filing
(economictimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Well that's damning and ought to lead to penalties. On the other hand,
People make false reports about social media content and accounts all the time. I could mail the admins of sopuli.xyz and tell them that I'm @misk@sopuli.xyz's mother and they're too young to be using Lemmy. Said admins should ignore me like the crazy person I am unless I can prove it.
When in doubt, the default should be asking for proof. You can't sell alcohol to a kid and then say you didn't check for ID because it's too much of a hassle.
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.
In a physical business yes but in the internet anyone can fake anything.