Topic
Legal and product obligations around minors' data, parental consent and platform safeguards for under-13 users.
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