Tag: think of the children

Pennsylvania Sues Snapchat Over Lack of Age Verification

Child safety is an extremely powerful weapon used to force private companies to implement age verification digital ID checks and, in some cases, change the design of their platforms. And once this is done, it’s not clear that children are any safer, but one thing is certain: online privacy and anonymity are weakened, and in some cases, lost.

This is the context in which the latest legal action against a major US tech company should be seen. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday has sued Snap, the maker of the Snapchat app, accusing it of violating the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law (UTPCPL).

The filing, in Philadelphia County on August 25, 2026, is framed as consumer protection, but it is about pressing Snap to verify its users’ ages and to change how the app is designed.

“Child safety” is a broad and vague banner that can cover a lot of ground – from protecting minors from predators and inappropriate content, to shielding them from features that the state decides are “addictive.”

But before it gets to the “addictive” part, the complaint states that Snapchat’s age gate is not good enough – specifically, that it defaults to 18, and that this makes it “unreliable.”

The filing further states that this has “helped render Snap’s efforts to protect young users from predatory adults practically useless for any safety features that depend on accurate age-gate information.”

The remedy the state wants is a court order forcing Snap to implement reliable age verification for all users.

Other claims made in the suit are that Snap has misrepresented how often adult-themed content appears on the platform in order to get the app a 13+ rating in stores – and that it has built “addictive” features into the app, such as infinite scroll and autoplay.

“Snap deliberately designed Snapchat to be addictive,” the complaint says, adding that the company “knows that minor users especially are susceptible to Snapchat’s addictive features.”

The features that the state wants a court to stop Snap from using are: Snapstreaks, push notifications, infinite scroll, autoplay, ephemeral content, and Snapchat+’s Friend Solar System.

The suit also wants the court to order Snap to pay civil penalties and cover the costs of the suit.

Keep reading

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Calls on YouTube and TikTok to Match Its Teen Safeguards

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will pay $18 billion to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of fueling a teen mental health crisis, but nearly a third of that sum depends on whether TikTok and YouTube agree to adopt the same safeguards. The social media giant is now directly calling on its largest competitors to follow Zuckerberg’s lead.

The settlement announced just days into a trial brought by a coalition of state attorneys general, resolves claims that Meta hooked children on its platforms and ignored the resulting harms, including anxiety, depression and suicide, to protect its profits. Meta will pay 70 percent of the total, about $12.7 billion, upfront. The remaining $5.3 billion only gets released if TikTok and Google’s YouTube together pay a matching $5.3 billion and adopt the same restrictions Meta is imposing on itself.

Those required changes include a one-hour daily usage limit for teens, a “night mode” that blocks access during bedtime hours, and age verification measures. Meta agreed to a two-hour daily limit for teens on Facebook and Instagram, which would drop to one hour if TikTok and YouTube fall in line. The night mode default would block teen access from midnight to 6:00 a.m. Most provisions in the settlement are set to last 10 years.

Meta is also banning filters for “cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup,” removing “Likes” and other reactions from teen posts by default, and strengthening parental oversight tools. The settlement leaves Meta’s recommendation algorithm, the system that decides what content teens see, untouched.

Meta published an open letter calling out its rivals directly, writing that “these protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place.” As of Wednesday afternoon, neither company had responded, despite multiple requests for comment. TikTok recently settled a separate, unrelated case with the DOJ for $400 million over children’s privacy.

Keep reading

Google To Expand Play Age Signals API to All Users Worldwide

Just in time for the global digital ID push, Google will roll out its Play Age Signals API to all Google Play users worldwide by the end of 2026. This gives Android apps an easy way to ask Google how old its users are.

Google Play’s vice president of product management, Paul Feng, announced the expansion on July 29. Australia and Canada come first by mid-August, followed by “a full global rollout to all users later this year.” Apple launched its own version, the Declared Age Range API, worldwide in February.

An app calls the API while it’s running and Play answers with the band the user falls into, 0-12, 13-15, 16-17, or 18+ by default. Developers can redraw those bands in the Play Console. A developer who sets minimum ages of 13 and 17 gets users sorted into 0-12, 13-16, and 17 and over.

The feedback arrives as a lower and an upper bound, and the top band carries no upper bound, so an adult in that setup comes back as ageLower = 17, an age floor with no ceiling. A user who declined to share gets no band at all, only a NOT_SHARED status. Google’s rules bar any other use of the answer, “including, but not limited to, advertising, marketing, user profiling or analytics.”

To parents, Google says the API as “a privacy-preserving tool that puts parents in the driver’s seat.” A parent enters a child’s range once in the Family Link app, 16-17 rather than an exact birth date and every app that has built in the API can read it. Google says sharing is off until a parent opts in and that the setting can be changed or switched off at any time.

That default lasts until a law overrides it and Texas already has and you only have to look at the latest senate bill that we just covered to know exactly how this “privacy” preserving plan can end up being anything but. Adults can share their own range when an app asks. “Providing a safe online experience and protecting users from harm is a top priority at Google Play,” Feng wrote in his announcement.

Apps receive more than a band. Google’s developer pages say an app can receive “users’ age verification or supervision status, age ranges, and other applicable signals,” and the status field can also come back VERIFICATION_REQUIRED. A developer knows when a user declined to share and when an age was verified rather than declared, and Google leaves it to each app to decide what to accept. TechRadar, citing reports, says users who fail to complete verification can be blocked from downloading a wide range of apps, not just those with adult ratings.

The API went live in Brazil on March 17, the day the Digital ECA took effect. That law bans the “I am over 18” checkbox and threatens fines of up to 50 million reais, about US$9.44 million, or 10 percent of a company’s Brazilian revenue. Texas followed.

Play began returning ages and running an age verification flow for Texans who created accounts after May 28, once a federal appeals court stayed the December 2025 injunction that had blocked the state’s App Store Accountability Act.

Keep reading

Paxton “Child Safety” Plan Puts Legal Speech at Criminal Risk

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running for the US Senate, and pushing online digital ID age verification checks in the name of “online safety,” has announced a data center plan that, among other things, vows to “protect children” by making data center companies criminally liable if the centers they operate “empower AI chatbots that undermine children’s safety.”

Paxton is effectively promising to author legislation that would introduce a novel form of liability, aimed at data centers – the physical and hardware part of the internet’s infrastructure – for the content that is generated by software running on their servers.

This is a clear departure from the principle, enshrined in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), that internet infrastructure is not liable for third-party, user-generated content.

And, while Paxton’s plan speaks of chatbots that “undermine children’s safety” – a broad and vague term that can easily be abused to censor speech – the actual target could be any chatbot, and any speech.

And the liability would be criminal.

Paxton is quoted as saying in a post on X: “My Texas First Data Center Plan will protect our grid, our communities, and our children while ensuring America beats Communist China in the AI race,” he wrote.

Keep reading

A Law That the People It Targets Can Defeat With a Felt-Tip Pen

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill was introduced on 24 August 2026 – the very day I arrived back in New Zealand after nearly a month away.

Readers of “A Halflings View” will be well aware of my views about bans or restrictions on access to social media platform by the young. Although the news media have trumpeted the present proposals as a “ban” it is not. It actually constitutes a form of limited restriction.

This article is very much a “first impression” view of the Bill. Much of the material and commentary is gathered from earlier writings I have produced on the subject as well as from other sources among them Ani O’Brien, “Thought Crimes” (Substack) — “Hear me out: Ban the hardware not the software”; the New Zealand Initiative; Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster; UNICEF Aotearoa (Susan Glasgow); Australia’s eSafety Commissioner three-month evaluation (July 2026); UK Ofcom/House of Lords material and reporting on the Online Safety Act; and US litigation (NetChoice; the Louisiana and Arkansas decisions).

Furthermore, this article (and indeed the Bill itself) will not be the final word.

The Bill has not yet had its First Reading and that is unlikely before Parliament rises. But Prime Minister Luxon and Erica Stanford were determined to push this ill-advised proposal ahead at pace, even although what it really amounts to is an announcement until the Bill has its First Reading. And it may even fall at that fence. If it makes it, Select Committee submissions and further commentary will accumulate quickly.

Hence the critique reflects the position as at the time of publication of this article.

What the Bill actually does

The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill, introduced to Parliament on 24 August 2026 by Education Minister Erica Stanford, is a stand-alone statute built on two load-bearing duties.

The first (clause 11) requires operators of “age-restricted platforms” to take reasonable steps to stop New Zealanders under 16 from holding an account. The second (clause 14) requires those operators to produce an annual, written child safety risk assessment covering all under-18s who use the platform.

Behind these sit an enforcement apparatus of warnings, enforceable undertakings, corrective notices, tiered pecuniary penalties (up to the greater of NZ$40 million or 10% of global turnover), and, as a last resort, service restriction orders and access restriction orders that would conscript ISPs, app stores and ancillary providers into preventing access to the platform from New Zealand.

The regulator is the Secretary of Internal Affairs — the chief executive of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). More on this disturbing aspect later.

Much of the drafting is careful.

It regulates the account, not the child, so no penalty falls on minors or parents.

It explicitly forbids treating manual date-of-birth entry as a “reasonable step”.

It goes beyond the Privacy Act by requiring destruction of age-assurance data.

The Bill is also more sophisticated than the “ban” it is marketed as. As I have argued on earlier occasions about similar proposals, this is a set of managed restrictions on account-holding, not a prohibition on children seeing content. Publicly available material remains reachable.

But the care in the drafting cannot rescue the concept.

The Bill imports a policy model that has already been trialled next door in Australia and in Britain, and the trials are in.

What follows is the case against it — a case now supported by a striking amount of hard evidence rather than speculation — followed by the specific problem of handing the whole scheme to the DIA.

The central flaw: a “targeted” measure that touches everyone

The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not.

To reliably prevent a 15-year-old from holding an account, a platform must satisfy itself about the age of every account-holder — which in practice means age-assuring the entire adult population as well.

Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster made the point bluntly when the policy was first floated. Keeping under-16s out means everyone over 16 has to prove they are over 16. The New Zealand Initiative put it the same way — everyone will have to demonstrate they are not under sixteen, including you.

This is the paradox the Bill never resolves, and it is not a drafting quibble but the whole problem.

Clause 11 forbids the “cheap check” (a manual date of birth entry) and forbids relying solely on formal ID or a digital identity service, which forces platforms toward either document upload, facial age-estimation, or “age inference” from behavioural and device signals.

Keep reading

AG Blanche’s Warning Points Straight at Age Verification Checks

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has managed to extract $400 million from TikTok, and this is not a story about the company being forced to change its ways – but pay up nonetheless.

The settlement, which means no admission of wrongdoing on the part of TikTok, will see the company pay $300 million now, and another $100 million once a prior consent decree is vacated.

That earlier decree came from a 2019 case, United States v. Musical.ly, an app that was later folded into TikTok. The current case, United States v. ByteDance, was filed in 2024 and is now dismissed with prejudice.

The original complaint accused ByteDance of violating the COPPA Rule by letting children slip past TikTok’s age gate and “knowingly creating accounts for children and collecting data from those children” without “verifiable parental consent.”

The 2019 consent decree also sought to ensure that the company would get “verifiable parental consent” before collecting personal information from children.

The settlement reached now requires TikTok to change absolutely nothing.

The DOJ explains this by saying that since the 2024 filing, TikTok “has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices” and “implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight.”

Those changes “have materially advanced the public interests underlying the Department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families,” the DOJ said.

And what is “verifiable parental consent” that’s the main aspect of the original complaint and the 2019 consent decree? That’s where things get interesting. COPPA doesn’t mandate any specific method, but lists several, which escalate quickly from a signed consent form, to a payment from a parent’s credit or debit card, to submitting a government-issued ID and matching it to a face scan, or being verified over video call.

In other words, proving that a parent has given consent tends to boil down to proving who everyone is.

Keep reading

States take Meta to trial in California in the biggest fight yet over social media harms to children

Of the thousands of lawsuits Meta faces over child safety on its platforms, none may be more consequential than one going to trial this week in California.

States are seeking extensive financial damages that could, in theory, total as much as $1.4 trillion, plus changes to how the company operates Facebook and Instagram.

The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that get children addicted to its platforms. It also claims that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law.

“Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains,” the lawsuit says.

Dozens of states filed the lawsuit three years ago. The trial set to begin Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, features four of the states as plaintiffs — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. The other 25 states are expected to have trials later.

Meta said it disputes the allegations, and the trial evidence will show its commitment to supporting young people. “We’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most,” the company said in a statement.

States seek to land a major blow against Meta
For Meta, which already lost two pivotal cases over harms to children and teens this year, the stakes are high. The company reported a rare profit decline last month, in part due to $2.4 billion in legal expenses.

The $1.4 trillion figure, which Meta disclosed in a legal filing, is almost as high as the Menlo Park, California, company’s entire market capitalization — that is, the value of all its outstanding shares on the stock market. Paying it would inevitably put Meta Platforms in bankruptcy and perhaps put the company under state ownership.

“The state attorneys general are going for the gusto,” said Eric Goldman, a professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. “They are trying to set the definitive precedent in this case and they have asked for extraordinary damages and they are going to seek extraordinary structural remedies if they succeed.”

Meta calls the possible penalty “untethered to any claimed violation” by the states.

“A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” Meta said in a July 6 filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

If Meta loses the trial, the court would have wide discretion over the size of any financial penalty, and legal experts say anything close to $1.4 trillion would be unlikely.

“It’s not plausible in the sense that Meta doesn’t have that much money and could not get it,” said James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. “An award that large would put Meta into bankruptcy, wipe out its owners, and effectively result in the states owning Meta.”

Keep reading

French Constitutional Court Blocks Macron’s Social Media Ban for Under 15s To Uphold Freedom of Expression and Protect Privacy

But Macron is not giving up.

As Emmanuel Macron, who is failing, approaches the end of his second and last French presidential term, he is clearly thinking about his legacy.

But, with no less than 7 prime ministers under his rule, the legacy is instability, mass migration, and social chaos.

So, he needs shiny new legislation that’ll look good – he thinks – in the pages of future history books.

Such is the case of his social media ban for under-15s.

While the core idea is not so divisive, the actual plans for implementation bear all the marks of the Globalist ideas he is always advancing.

Yesterday, France’s top court blocked the social media ban bill, saying it infringed upon freedom of ‌expression.

Reuters reported:

“The bill would have barred children younger than 15 from opening a social media account from September 1. Accounts already open would be ​closed within four months by social media platforms, which would also need to use age ​verification approved by the French privacy regulator.

But France’s Constitutional Council found that the ⁠bill, while requiring everyone to give proof of age, failed ‘to specify the conditions and limits’ under ​which it should be provided, as well as infringing on freedoms and privacy.

‘The Council holds that the ​contested provisions, on the one hand, disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication and, on the other, fail to provide the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life’, it said.”

Keep reading

Texas Locked a Foreign Company’s Domain Over Missing Digital ID Checks

In Travis County, Texas, a judge has frozen motherless.com, the .com domain of a foreign pornography operator, taking it down worldwide until it posts a $9.14 million bond and builds an age verification digital ID system to the state’s own specification.

Kick Online Entertainment is a foreign corporation, and the order admits so, which is the reason the writ went somewhere else. A state court cannot summon a company overseas, but it can order the American firm that keeps the registry of every .com name, and that registry is what makes a domain resolve at all.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The case turns on HB 1181, Texas’s age-verification law for adult sites. That firm is Verisign, a nonparty to it, and Judge Maya Guerra Gamble signed the writ of attachment on June 4, 2026, filed four days later in State of Texas v Kick Online Entertainment.

The order directs Verisign to place motherless.com on “a registry lock, hold, or similar status until replevied by Defendant,” the legal term for the operator posting a bond to get its domain back.

The domain is frozen rather than taken, though the difference means little here. What Verisign actually applied on was serverHold plus server-level prohibitions on deleting, transferring and updating the name. A hold pulls motherless.com out of the .com zone file, so it resolves for nobody.

Kick must post a bond of $9,140,000, and that bond is “conditioned on Defendant’s implementation of age verification that conforms with Texas Civil Practice and Remedies code chapter 129B,” together with an affirmation that it will satisfy the civil penalties entered against it on September 30, 2024. A company outside the state’s reach is being made to both pay and obey a Texas statute before its property comes back. This is specific performance of a state law, pulled from a foreign operator by holding an asset hostage at the registry.

Among the court’s stated reasons the writ is “appropriate and justified” is the finding that “Defendant is not a resident of this state and is a foreign corporation,” which turns the state’s inability to reach a company into a ground for taking its property.

The order then pre-authorizes more of the same, closing with the line that “as many writs as the State deems necessary shall issue,” so the count of future seizures is set by the attorney general and not by a judge weighing each one. And Texas was excused from the security these writs normally demand, because the order says “the State of Texas is not required to post a bond prior to the issuance of the Writ of Attachment.”

The party taking the asset posts nothing. The party losing it posts $9.14 million.

Keep reading

Four Kids “Safety” Bills, Supporting Online Digital ID Agenda, Hit Senate Floor

The CHATBOT Act says that nothing in it shall be construed to require a company to “implement an age gating or age verification” system, or to “affirmatively collect any personal data with respect to the age of any individual that the covered entity is not already collecting in the normal course” of its business. The Kids Online Safety Act carries a version of the same promise, ruling out “the affirmative collection of any personal data with respect to the age of users” that a platform doesn’t already gather.

But now read the rest of the same bills…

Yesterday, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee sent four children’s online safety bills to the Senate floor, with parents who attribute the harm of their children to social media sitting right there in the room. KOSA went through on a unanimous voice vote. This obviously wasn’t a place for a debate. The Youth AI Privacy Act from Senator Ed Markey advanced. So did the CHATBOT Act from Senator Ted Cruz, with Senators Schatz, Curtis and Schiff as co-sponsors. Senator Tammy Duckworth’s bill makes four, and it orders the FTC and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to study AI-enabled toys, which turns on nothing a company has to know about a user. A fifth, the SCREEN Act, got a tally and no result, which we’ll come back to.

KOSA passed the Senate in 2024 by 91 to 3, but the House never took it up. KOSA’s “duty of care” is the provision that gets the attention. It requires platforms to “exercise reasonable care” in design features to prevent and mitigate a listed set of harms to minors, with the FTC enforcing, and the harms run from conditions with “clinically diagnosable symptoms” through patterns of use “that indicate compulsive” behavior to sexual exploitation. The House stripped it out. The Senate sponsors called that version dead on arrival.

Keep reading