Meta has spent more than a year advocating for new laws requiring app stores to give parents control over kids’ app downloads, and just saw an early victory in the states. But Google charges that it’s really just a misguided effort to “offload” Meta’s own responsibility to keep kids safe.
The missive follows the passage of Utah’s App Store Accountability Act, the first of its kind to advance to the governor’s desk, putting the onus on app store operators to keep kids from accessing inappropriate content. There are similar bills in more than a dozen states across the country in a growing trend of kids safety legislation, in the wake of the Kids Online Safety Act’s failure to become law last year, and ongoing legal battles over many other state laws.
My cynical take is that Facebook wants the money from ads target at children, but not the responsibility of vetting the apps they might download because the trust the platform they are in. Google and Apple just want to pass the responsibility to developers and create laws that punish them for misusing tools they want to provide so other people deal with the complaints.
Still being cynical. It’s not that big corporations can’t do anything. They just can’t do anything without using their own money.
