Children's Health Defense Facebook’s parent company, Meta, knowingly allows millions of children under age 13 to use Instagram, but “zealously” hides that fact from the public, according to a newly unredacted legal complaint filed against the company and reported by The New York Times.
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Facebook’s parent company, Meta, knowingly allows millions of children under age 13 to use Instagram, but “zealously” hides that fact from the public, according to a newly unredacted legal complaint filed against the company and reported by The New York Times.
Although Meta received more than 1 million reports of underage users, it disabled only “a fraction” of the accounts and instead “routinely continued to collect” children’s personal information — including locations and email addresses — without parental consent, the unredacted document alleges.
The company also purposefully uses its technology “to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens” and publicly misrepresents its platforms as safe for youth, while concealing its own internal research showing that users experienced harms on its platforms at high rates.
These practices violated the federal children’s privacy law and California’s false advertising and unfair competition laws, according to the complaint.
“Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed,” the complaint noted.
The charges are part of a federal lawsuit filed in October by a bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general against Meta Platforms Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The original filing included evidence that remained conditionally under seal as part of the investigation.
The mostly unredacted complaint, publicly released Monday, provides additional information, which was blacked out in the original filing, about Meta’s alleged misconduct.
Using text from internal employee emails and chats, phone call transcripts, company presentations and passages from internal reports, the complaint makes the case that Meta saw great value in children and teens’ time and data and intentionally targeted them to grow company profits.
“Meta knows that what it is doing is bad for kids — period. Thanks to our unredacted federal complaint, it is now there in black and white, and it is damning,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a press release. “We will continue to vigorously prosecute this matter.”
Under the Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPPA), it is illegal to collect data on children under 13 and companies are subject to fines of up to $50,120 per violation…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (childrenshealthdefense.org)
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