alt Hacker News> then I can configure my kids' devices to disallow that
C'mon. We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age. The kids will be begging them to and saying "It's just to personalize it, Dad! There's nothing scary or bad on Tiktok - all my friends are using the personalized feed and mine is BORING!"
> The decision should be happening in my house on the devices I control, not in a Meta data center. The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.
The decision would still be in your hand. If you want them to be using all the max addictive crap, just fake their age on the device that you bought them.
> The current law just gives Meta a way to start building a shadow profile early.
Whether or not they can start building a profile to start using at 18 is unrelated to this, and depends on data protection laws. There's no use tying the two together.
> We all know parents are far more likely to tap "OK" for "Allow personalized social feeds?" than they are to knowingly falsify their kids' age.
I know lots of parents and lots of kids, and I don't think this is accurate. In my experience the breakdown is parents who care what their kids are doing online, and parents who assume it will all turn out fine because they had AOL or even Facebook as teenagers and didn't get into too much trouble. The first group is already keeping an eye on their kids and might even have decent parental controls set up, and the second group doesn't care what happens as long as charges don't show up on the credit card.
These bills punish the first group of parents and OS/device makers for the transgressions of social media companies. The uninvolved parents won't even be in the room when the age question comes up.