The AGs reveal their hand against Meta

On October 24, 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta. Attorneys general alleged that the company hurts younger users by intentionally designing addictive and harmful products at the expense of their privacy and well being.

At the time, the lawsuits’ merits were difficult to assess, since much of the evidence in the 233-page complaint was redacted. But this week, with Meta’s approval, the full complaint was made public. And what we could only speculate about last month now seems ripe for a fuller discussion.

Writing about the subject last month, I divided the complaint into two big parts. One is focused on privacy; the other on everything else. Let’s take privacy first.

I.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) places several requirements on platforms that collect data on users under the age of 13. Chief among these is the need to obtain verifiable parental consent for the user; it also puts restrictions on how data on younger users can be collected and used.

In practice, all of this is more trouble than it’s worth. And so most major platforms prohibit under-13s from signing up, while remaining well aware that underage users are using their services daily. This means platforms get to have their cake and eat it too: reap the rewards of the engagement and ad revenue that comes with younger users on the platform, while also insisting that they’re not there, or that if they are there they shouldn’t be, and also look at how many under-13 accounts we remove every year.

Platforms’ wink-wink, nudge-nudge relationship with COPPA has been mostly tolerated until now. But the unredacted lawsuit lays out what appears to be a straightforward case of a company well aware it is collecting reams of data on underage users and not seeking parental permission as required.

The lawsuit alleges:

Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.

Meta’s extensive internal records documenting its actual knowledge of its under-13 Instagram users and collection of data from those users include the following: (1) charts boasting Instagram’s penetration into 11- and 12-year-old demographic cohorts; (2) an internal report presented to Zuckerberg regarding the four million under-13