Lowering the minimum age for meta search to 10 years

The government’s investigation into how tech companies handle their underage users is ongoing. A spate of bills in Congress on the subject seeks to strengthen the power of regulators and even ban children under 13 from social media altogether.

Enter Meta, which is lowering the minimum age for its Quest headset from 13 to 10. When I heard about the plan and contacted Meta for comment this week, spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed it and shared a blog post about the news Which the company is planning to publish soon. It added that parents must approve the creation of a child’s account and that Meta will only recommend apps that are deemed safe for that age group. Advertisements will also not be shown to children.

Perhaps most importantly, the meta profile and avatar of a 10- to 12-year-old child, which Quest uses for all kinds of apps, will be set to private by default, “meaning people can’t see what’s going on with him or her.” Parental approval. Meta’s blog post states that only parents can turn off this safety feature. And horizon worldThe open-world, legless social platform for Quest will remain a 13-year-old experience, at least for now.

It’s easy to see why Meta is doing this. The company knows that kids want to use VR headsets, and it’s better to give them a more restricted experience than to let them lie about their age. If I had to guess, Meta also wants to get ahead of any potential lawsuits or fines, such as the $520 million recently imposed against Epic Games by the FTC. In that case, the agency found that “Epic knew that many children were playing Fortnite,” Which, duh. Now Meta can say the least it offers an underage option with strict parental controls.

Even if this is a good move on the part of Meta, it knows that this is a sensitive topic that will potentially result in more angry senate letter, The company did its best to keep the plan from leaking out internally (spicy, I guess?), under the name “Project Salsa.” This requires the employees involved to sign a separate legal disclosure and mark the document as “A/C Privilege” in case the FTC is still coming knocking.

This story first ran in today’s edition of my Command Line newsletter, which you can sign up for below:

Update June 16th, 11:50AM ET: Added link to Meta’s blog post.