40
votes
Accused of violating kids' privacy, Meta sues US Federal Trade Commission, hoping to block ban on monetizing kids’ data
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- Authors
- Jon Brodkin
- Published
- Nov 30 2023
- Word count
- 405 words
Hear me out people: We need laws. We can't rely purely on federal agency regulation and court rulings to make progress.
When we see a positive impact from regulations, those regulations need backed by laws. Facebook wouldn't be able to argue "overreach of FTC power" and instead would have to fight a lot more legal precedent about Congress having the authority to regulate the internet....You gonna take the PR hit trying to rollback anti-child porn laws in order to advertise? Good luck with that one. I'll run some nice ads about Facebook trying to advertise pornography to kids. I'll take my chances with the slander lawsuit later.
As a side bonus, it would drastically limit the impact of presidents being able to rollback net neutrality and EPA regulations. Or a single bad court ruling being able to instantly rollback abortion rights.
To circle back fully on-topic, and a bit more pie-in-the-sky idealist....we should ban monetizing children entirely. Especially for under-13 kids, whom have little or no ability to properly consent to marketting tactics. Hell I'd argue most adults are unable to make properly informed decisions about consent to marketting as it's currently done.
It's not OK for adults to have sex with teenagers, in part because of the wisdom and knowledge that an adult has gives them an unfair power dynamic to exploit the teens. Its how you get children groomed into an abuse pipeline, and when they hit 18 they end up cycling a drain of horrible, but not illegal, relationships....because they got conditioned into accepting manipulative abuse behavior.
How is it suddenly OK for a company then to be able to use this exact same power imbalance to auction off highly targetted ads to the highest bidder? Just because it's not directly sexual? It's still behavioral conditioning, and no less exploititive. And unless there is magical perfect enforcement, it will be exploited by abusers, I can promise you that.
I'd go a bit farther than that. Ban monetizing people.
When you try singling out children to protect like this, what actually winds up happening is either
If we're going to declare this unacceptable behavior for a corporation, we should actually enforce that, not just yell "but what about the children?"
I mean, I'm there with you. But I frequently get called out on being a dreamer and I figure we got about a 0% chance for everyone, but maybe a 10% chance for kids, so, you know....hope.
That and I do believe there needs to be better seperation between types of children, as you're right that a 17 year old shouldn't require nearly as many restrictions as a 7 year old.
And that dreamer in me would hope that after having an entire youth of being barely exposed to advertising, it will be utterly repugnant and weird. There is the whole "lack of immune response" to worry about, but I'd wager the shock factor of it would overcome.
Consent in the context of "by using this website you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service" is already meaningless. Some ideas I think would help:
1 reform contract law by setting a higher bar for "meeting of the minds" when contracts are between corporations and individuals, so that you signed it even if you didn't understand it" is no longer a valid way to enter a contract.
2 Create a government oversight organization (similar to public defenders for criminal cases) that has the power to represent individuals or invalidate contracts.
Without the huge advantage (as you mentioned) that contract law currently afford corporations, suddenly they have to deal much more fairly and directly with people. I think thus would improve things in a broader way that would also encompass things like not monetizing children's data because they'd have to be a lot more transparent about it.