testrunMeta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety
The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
My guess: to discriminate whether traffic is from a humam or bot to improve ad delivery metrics.
Most sites are not going to implement this themselves.
I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with their meta or google account to unrelated websites.
They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
Everything consumer facing from meta is like a toxic waste hazard. It makes me sad seeing people stuck on those platforms.
A few weeks after they expanded access beyond .edu domains, I deleted my account. Haven't looked back since. Not an ounce of regret.
To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they might as well make money off the data.
I can't figure it out so please enlighten me.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues
Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.
given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.
Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.
That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users.
Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.
$375M isn't even a slap on the wrist for a company that raked in $60B last year.
It takes 7 clicks to turn off ads that promote eating disorders. Thats enough proof.