Standard
A U.S. federal law (15 U.S.C. §§ 6501–6506) requiring online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data from children under 13.
An internal document put teen adoption of Instagram's Take a Break at 1.8%. Mosseri's blog post advertised more than 90% retention. Those two numbers are the states' case now.
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California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey say features built to extend teen sessions are the defect. A court has already dismissed Meta's Section 230 appeal in the case.
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California's AG says the child-safety case is about civil penalties and restitution, not damages. The exposure sits between $200 billion and $1.4 trillion, plus an order to strip features.
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A federal jury in Oakland is hearing that Meta built addictive products for children. After a $6m bellwether loss, retention design now sits in the same risk register as privacy.
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The DoJ split the payment, holding a quarter of it against the removal of a legacy consent decree, and credited TikTok's later fixes without discounting the bill for the earlier ones.
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Musical.ly paid $5.7mn in 2019 over the same statute. The DOJ's complaint treats registration-flow design as the violation, which makes age-gating a documented enforcement target.
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Default 2-hour caps, a midnight-to-6am block and age assurance are now written down, with a contingent payment attached to Snap, TikTok and YouTube adopting the same defaults.
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A judge signed off on the payout, but the enforceable part is a list of product defaults only a parent can undo. Meta's rivals had the terms written for them.
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Fifty-one attorneys general did not just extract a payment; they wrote a testable product specification and hired someone outside the company to check it. The open question is what the age checks may look at.
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The fixed $12.7 billion works out to roughly two days of Meta's revenue a year, while the contingent tranche, worth about nine days of sales, only gets paid if three competitors decline to restrict teens the way Meta now must.
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Apple's Kids Category rule and COPPA's definition of a child's voice both point a preschool voice product at local processing, and Whisper's error on children's speech falls by nearly a factor of three from tiny to large-v3.
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COPPA and FERPA gave the teachers' unions nothing. A clause inside a Microsoft contract gives them something different: a termination right and damages. The unions are now waiting on OpenAI and Anthropic to match it.
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The headline number is up to $17.1 billion, of which about $5.13 billion is payable only if rival platforms settle too. The part Meta cannot buy out is a combined two-hour cap, a midnight lockout and silent school hours.
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Impression guarantees signed months ago were priced against platform defaults. The state settlement has now changed those defaults, and the contracts carrying the guarantees contain no clean mechanism for the gap that opens.
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Self-attested birthdays are out for adults as well as teens, and Techdirt reads the deal as obliging Meta to collect and keep more data on the teenagers it is meant to protect. That is an odd shape for a privacy remedy.
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Twenty-nine state attorneys general released their COPPA claims so Meta can train a model that finds under-13 accounts. The agency that actually enforces COPPA was not at the table, and an auditor now holds the line.
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A two-hour cap, a midnight blackout and parent-only overrides become the baseline any app with minors gets measured against. The tougher version is held back as a bargaining chip.
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The states' lawyers were playing for roughly $200 billion. Meta's guaranteed payment is about $12.1 billion spread over ten years, and a third of the headline number depends on TikTok and YouTube.
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The headline number is a ceiling, not a commitment. The durable cost sits in a 90-hour monthly cap on minors, an overnight notification blackout, and an abatement fund modelled on pollution law.
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Bloomberg reports Meta and state attorneys general are talking terms mid-trial. If a deal lands, the rules for teen accounts arrive as a term sheet with no finding of fact behind them.
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