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Meta will overhaul its approach to identifying young users on Facebook and Instagram. This comes after agreeing to an $18 billion settlement with US states over allegations involving child safety and social media use.
According to the agreement, Meta needs to invest in stronger age-assurance technology. The company must improve its ability to detect accounts belonging to children under 13 and teenagers who may have entered an adult birth date.
Meta traditionally relies on the age users provide when creating accounts. However, the tech giant already uses other signals to identify potentially underage users, including information and activity patterns visible on its platforms.
Meta will now strengthen these systems to proactively identify children's accounts. The tech giant will also improve technology for identifying users aged 13 to 17 who claim to be adults.
Children under 13 represent the toughest age-verification problem as Meta's platforms prohibit them from having accounts. Detecting them requires the company to identify users who falsely claim to be older without creating excessive privacy risks.
Stronger age verification requires platforms to process more personal information. Experts suggest that this creates tension with US child-privacy rules, particularly the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
The settlement does not require Meta to make every young user submit a government-issued identity document or video selfie. The agreement gives Meta flexibility to use different methods to establish whether users are accurately representing their ages. The tech giant will use automated technology with other platform signals and reporting mechanisms.
As of now, Meta will temporarily use data from identified children to train and test age-detection systems under the agreement. However, restrictions will be applied for using such information.
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