Source: TechCrunch
Meta's $18 billion settlement with US regulators requires age-verification systems to police minors on its platforms. The underlying technology is notoriously unreliable and demands invasive personal data collection. Compliance mechanisms thus generate the very privacy harms they're meant to prevent. This exposes a structural regulatory problem: policymakers are mandating solutions that don't work at scale without compromising the privacy rights they're also supposed to protect. Platforms face a choice between technical impossibility and privacy violation, leaving actual child safety unsolved while identity verification vendors capture compliance spending.