At Meta, Underage Users Were an 'Open Secret,' States Say | Hacker News Reader

At Meta, Underage Users Were an 'Open Secret,' States Say

nytimes.com

50 pointsreaperducer56 comments

Whatever happened to the Internet where the person on the other end could be a dog? Why is this surprising to anyone and why do so many people even care about changing it?

I really would hate to use this stuff if there were mandatory ID verifications all the time, and I think it would take something away from the experience too.

Facebooks value proposition to end user and customers (i.e advertisers) is that you are not a dog.

But I partly agree. I prefer talking with anonymous dogs on the internet too and would hate for that to disappear.

> why do so many people even care about changing it?

Because multiple laws could punish them for tracking kids, so they think "anyone could be a kid" threatens their business model.

That was the point all along.

These technologies like surveillance, facebook, phones, ect are all imposing separately..

When you fuse those technologies together, you can track and clamp down on and own men like a farmer owns cattle.

The next 'freedom' will likely be using tech to force people out of apathy, pushing them up and off the ground floor with electronic provocation.

On that internet, you don't post self-portraits showing your real face every ten minutes.

Facebook is the antithesis of the internet and should never have existed.

Creeps me out tbh. I miss the internet with weird usernames and spinning 3d logos as avatars.

I understand why it is the way it is but honestly it makes me uncomfortable with the large social media sites.

"Socialization" turns into human farming a bit too quickly.

Whole lot of people are not understanding the point.

Of course there are kids on the internet. And on Facebook. That's what the article (and lawsuit) are saying. And of course Meta knows it.

That is exactly why Meta needs to stop their psychologically manipulative and harmful practices. Identifying who is a kid is not working well enough. Preventing kids from accessing services and being manipulated and harmed is not working well enough.

Kids will access these websites, and when they do, it isn't a fair fight. They're taking their developing brains and going up against billion dollar algorithms designed by armies of professional psychologists to manipulate them to maximize "engagement". And unsurprisingly, this is having negative effects.

Facebook cannot claim they don't know this - everyone knows this. They need to change how they treat everyone, if they can't exclude kids. Kids are killing themselves because of Facebook. We need to stop this manipulation across the board.

> They're taking their developing brains and going up against billion dollar algorithms designed by armies of professional psychologists

You WISH they were developed by professional psychologists. They were mostly designed by undergraduate-trained programmers and UX "researchers" who took 2 semesters of basic psychology and learned what the word "heuristic" means and ran with it wholesale. I can tell you first-hand as a psychology PhD I'm basically unhireable for those positions because in training for my actual degree I didn't get the programming skills they require.

Well it was an 'Open Secret' outside of Meta as well, wasn't it?

I would just call it open. No secret part applies at all.

It’s the ‘open secret’ of the internet.

It has nothing to do with Meta.

Literally everyone can figure out that if a website asks for your age or birthday, what you can put in whatever you want.

WhatsApp has an age limit of 13, but pretty much every kid gets an account when they are old enough to read and write. It's the de-facto way of communication, so parents just lie about the age knowingly.

That combined with the fact that it's impossible for a 3rd party to report an underaged user ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All my friends use Facebook and Instagram when they were underage, and I certainly used other social media when I was underage, though not those two.

There's nothing secret about this open secret.

Add it to the already overwhelming pile of evidence that self regulation does not work and that external oversight is needed in situations like this.

It sure seems like the average person doesn't care that children use Facebook and similar online services. Why should we give more power to state regulators when the public doesn't even want the regulation in the first place?

The public clearly does care, because there are laws that have been passed to specifically address data collection for underage users: https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-attorney-ge....

Whether or not those laws do what they're intended to do is another question, but to say the public 'doesn't care', is a baseless assumption to make.

Plenty of laws are passed that the public doesn't care about. Sometimes the public is even opposed to them.

The public doesn't pass laws though, our elected representatives do. Without diving down the rabbit hole of how well our current system manages to select for representatives that actually align with voters' views, there isn't a direct link between laws and public sentiment.

Parents purposely allowing children to use these services is a much more clear indicator of sentiment, and as mentioned in the article users don't seem to mind allowing their children to use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.

Why should we even consider putting any kind of limitations around what private companies do with the personal data of people too young to consent in any meaningful way isn’t a compelling argument.

Idelaly we wouldn't have to put limits on companies from the state level at all, users should decide not to use a service if they don't approve of how their data is used.

Given that we're no way close to this and the power imbalance is already huge, we should be regulating how every person's data is used regardless of age.

What is required to address the problem is not “oversight” in the abstract, but some form of government ID and age verification in order to use online services. Mark me down as one parent who prefers the situation we have now to the more dystopian one that would create.

I don't understand how a company is supposed to combat this. It's just accepting reality that "there will be underage users on our site anyway, and there isn't anything we can do about that, because they will lie". On a case-by-case basis if you find out someone is underage you have to terminate their account, but by and large you just have to accept that these people exist.

Many of my online accounts were first registered when I was underage. I'm not eager to let them know that, of course.

So much so that they wanted to create an Instagram for Kids.

This is better handled by the phone and app store. Expecting every app and website to figure out a user's age makes this more complicated than necessary.

https://archive.md/20231125210139/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

Of course there are. One can't handle Internet. It handles you.

When I was in the age of preteen/teen I got everything I wanted. Everything. Sure, today isn't very different from the past. If some teenager pricks want to use meta, watch Netflix or do some nasty chat & greet chat roulette - they're just do it. We need to teach them how to handle that dickheads they may see and the do's and don'ts. this should be without tabooing.

why call teenagers pricks?

Because Socrates already did this.. :)

Since so many have said.. The youths will be the doom for us.

Nowadays, the young ones learn less and less, know less than ever.. true true.. but also they use different tools as you and the tools are much better at what you do :) so actually we're accelerating.

It's a problem they don't care for fixing unless the regulators come.

Wait till states learn that teenagers say they’re 18 when they visit a porn site. gasp, pearl-clutching intesifies

So I'm wondering why we don't use AI to determine the likely age of a user from the photos they upload. Obviously there will be false-positives but then you can just ask them to upload a picture of their state ID/drivers license.

(I don't participate in social media, beyond HN...)

To me this would seem like a great idea. A couple hundred thousand folks who look 13 but are legally 26 who jump through some extra hoops, but several million children who cannot create a Facebook account.

The risk to reward seems awesome.

There's a lot of money to be made from those users.

Yeah, you can tell you don't use social media by this comment's suggestion, no need to tell us separately.

Yeah, I also thought there is someone who doesn't know what social media is all about :)

Why not suggest folks get some token from the state and use that for identifying them exactly. And also, using clear names would help as one Always can Google up the name and make sure the other end doesn't pretend

Social media was ruined a long time ago. Even here it's a disparate, incomplete conversation. I commented knowing the response I'd get from HN about false positives with AI determining user age.

Time to sue Facebook for the market value of every underage user, and the continuing harm of having a public presence from that age forward. Every job lost, every lost opportunity.

The very obvious loophole is that a teen could upload a picture of someone else to get an account made.

...and everyone uploading pictures of their kids would have to keep their drivers license handy.

I think only kid's driver licenses should be accepted... You should not be able to post a picture of kid on online.

Yes. True.

I think if you use someone's photo for Facebook, they're likely to already be on the site.

You could also have the AI look at the photos that are uploaded over time and if they look very different from the person who supposedly created the account...and comments from others are not questioning why these are a different person.

Right now they don't have people vetting. Throw AI at it for non-perfect but better results. As long as it's not a gov site I'm okay with this. Got off Facebook in 2005 when the first of my relatives became racists.

throwaway914, would you be willing to send over your drivers license for verification to participate on HN?

Nope. That's why I'm not on Facebook, which presently asks for ID when it deems necessary.

Any site that isn't my bank (or related), asking for my ID is just going to lose me as a user or if I have to use it, just encourage me to create several accounts to frequently rotate between.

As a minor I'd have had even more time to bother with something tedious like that.

See the problem here is I don't view social media as a loss, at least on the level of Facebook.

You can use makeup and let the AI think whatever age you are aiming for. It's not perfectly predictable but I haven't found any age AI that doesn't rank me from underage to old depending on what I aim for.

My guess is videos would work much better. But photos definitely don't yet.

My understanding is currently they do not vet user age. How could they? There are a few billion users. Even among different ethnicities people look younger or older depending on the society they group in. However, I was looking at this from a "confidence score" perspective. If it's an open secret that employees do nothing, throw AI at it to flat likely-to-be-underage users. Then throw what portion of employees you can at that effort, rather than vetting ~2 billion users.

i don’t think we need AI to solve any of these issues, or that we should be using AI as a kneejerk solution to almost anything currently

Presently they don't have the staff or the willingness to vet that all users are above the age of 13.

Or we could treat people like human beings and get rid of this idea that only children are harmed by social media and the constant bombardment of advertisers and “influencers”.

Most of the advertisers and influencers I know personally are children.

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