EFF: Meta's $17 Billion Deal With Prosecutors Means Surveillance and Age Checks for Everyone

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has broken down the terms of the settlement that Meta reached with the attorneys general of 52 US states and territories (only Florida, New Mexico and Texas stayed out). EFF's conclusion is unequivocal: this is a bad deal for all social media users, and especially for teenagers.

Age verification for everyone

Meta used to rely on people entering their own date of birth at sign-up. Now, within a year, the company is required to roll out an “age verification framework” and run every Facebook and Instagram user in the participating states through it — minors and adults alike. It may use both third-party commercial age-estimation technologies and Meta's own tools; signals from Apple's and Google's operating systems and app stores are also taken into account.

Users are sorted into three buckets: 18+, 13–17 and under 13. Anyone estimated to be under 13 loses their account. A newcomer who declines to complete verification within two weeks is treated as a teenager by default, even if they claim to be an adult. EFF points out that the settlement sets a cap on false positives (an adult mistaken for a teenager) but places no limit on the reverse error, leaving those affected only the right to appeal. For adults who pass verification, the settlement offers absolutely nothing — no privacy, no new settings.

Teenagers put under control

Teen accounts are subject to strict limits: a nighttime mode with no access from midnight to 6 a.m., a “school mode” with no notifications, a daily cap of two hours, and “productivity breaks” after an hour of use. Like counts are hidden by default, and “cosmetic” face-distorting filters are unavailable.

These restrictions can be lifted only by linking the account to a parent's. But in exchange the parent gets a hefty trove of data: the names of all of the teenager's contacts and conversation partners, time spent in the app, information about suspected secondary accounts, and alerts about repeated searches on topics of suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. For a teenager from a troubled family, EFF stresses, this is a danger rather than a protection.

More surveillance, not less

EFF is separately troubled by the restrictions on content “inappropriate for teens”: Meta has already filed information about abortion medication, breast cancer and LGBT topics under categories like “restricted goods” and “nudity.” Now prosecutors will be able to lean on the company through the courts, demanding a tougher interpretation — and Meta's First Amendment protection has been weakened by the terms of the deal.

Instead of reducing data collection, the settlement obligates Meta for ten years to surveil more actively: to hunt for minors across friend networks, to match devices and phones, to monitor conversations. Of the more than $17 billion, about $11 billion is payments to the states, and Meta will pay another $5 billion if its competitors (YouTube, TikTok, Snap) can be forced into the same measures. In essence, it is a bonus for the states to make age gates the norm across the whole internet.

Source: EFF Deeplinks