Meta tries to “unload” children’s safety in application stores, says Google

While Meta, Snap and X published a joint declaration praising the adoption of the Utah bill, Google calls it “concerning”. Rather than protecting children and giving parents more control, the director of Google’s public policy, Kareem Ghanem, writes, the legislation “requires that the application stores share if a user is a child or an adolescent with all the applicants of applications (millions of individual companies) without parental consent or rules on the way information is used. This increases real risks of privacy and security, such as the potential for bad players to sell data or use it for other harmful purposes. “Social media societies would be the real beneficiaries of the law, writes Ghanem, because they could” avoid this responsibility despite the fact that applications are only one of the many ways that children can access these platforms “. YouTube de Meta and Google has been criticized in the past so as not to do enough to ensure the safety of its younger users on their platforms Push children’s videos to potential predators or keep adolescents in a content loop that makes them feel bad about themselves. The two companies said they maintained solid policies and resources to create healthy experiences on their platforms.

“We welcome the Google concession that they can share information on age with application developers, and we agree that this should be done in a preserved confidentiality,” Meta spokesman Jamie Radice said in a statement. “But with millions of applications on the Google App Store, and more added every day, it is not clear how they will determine what applications are eligible to receive this data. The easiest way to protect adolescents online is to take care of parents. This is why the legislation should require that application stores obtain the consent of parents before allowing children to download applications. The App Store is the optimal place for parents to grant authorization and for user ages before downloading applications. Written in 2023Because “by checking the age of a teenager on the App Store, individual applications would not be required to collect potentially sensitive identification information.” The verification of user ages is a major concern for defenders of privacy, but it is that which is not yet entirely drawn up in part of the legislation. Utah, for example, said That App Store operators can use either “Methods available in the trade which are reasonably designed to guarantee accuracy” or other methods to be determined and deemed acceptable by state regulators.

Google thinks it has “a better way”. For Google, this means that application stores should only provide secure age insurance to developers who “really need it” – which means only for applications that offer risky content, and probably not for something more banal as a meteorological application. In this vein, Google offers to put more discretion on application developers, rather than in application stores, to determine the appropriate protections to be implemented for a given age group. “Because developers know their applications best, they are better placed to determine when and where an age door could be beneficial for their users, and this can evolve over time, which is another reason why a unique approach does not adequately protect children,” writes Ghanem. Google also offers “clear consequences for developers who violate user confidence” by doing things like “access to badly or share the age signal”.

Apple has also raised concerns about potentially excessive data collection. In a white paper announcement steps it would take to help protect children onlineIn particular the permission of parents to share the age ranges of children with the developers, Apple stressed the importance of collecting just the minimum amount of data to protect the confidentiality of users.

“Everyone wants to protect children and adolescents online and ensure that they are committed to age adapted to age,” writes Ghanem, “but how it is done.”