Topic
Legal and product obligations around minors' data, parental consent and platform safeguards for under-13 users.
OpenAI is the defendant in a proposed class action from a Hawaii mother whose 12- and 16-year-old opened ChatGPT accounts without parental consent. The complaint says sign-up never verifies that consent and that the chat data went into model training.
Reality
San Diego County sued AppLovin, alleging fingerprinting let it track children past Apple and Google parental controls and show them adult ads. For app teams, the case tests whether a platform's child setting protects anyone once a third-party ad SDK runs inside the game.
Reality
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.
Reality
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.
Perspective Coverage
5 publishersReality
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.
Perspective Coverage
6 publishersReality
Relatives are putting children's faces into image generators out of pure affection, and the automated filters, user lawsuits and proposed age limits now on offer were all built for a different kind of uploader.
Reality
The Justice Department's $400m children's privacy settlement made $100m of it payable only if a court vacated the 2019 Musical.ly consent decree. Judge George H. Wu has tentatively declined, so the obligations stay.
Reality
Kalie Robins clicked a question Meta AI put under a video of her daughter, and it returned both children's names and birth dates, a photo her mother had posted years ago, and one she says she deleted. Meta says it has fixed the prompting.
Reality
A viral video showed Meta AI naming a user's two daughters from years of posts uploaded mostly by relatives, and Meta says the assistant never should have asked the question that started it.
Reality
The attorney general's 66-page complaint quotes a 2016 engineering talk, a 2019 shareholder letter and a January 2020 earnings call, then asks the court to bar ad systems built with data from those years. Netflix says the case lacks merit.
Reality