Don’t sell privacy at cost of online safety

The potential danger of minors using social media has now become widely accepted, as showcased by the recent lawsuit against Meta and the social media age limit laws in Europe and Australia. To enforce these measures, companies are implementing new age-verification methods using photo ID. Although these new limits target minors, they impact the experience and privacy of all users.

To understand why these measures are being implemented, we should highlight the specific dangers social media presents to minors.

“There’s research showing that parts of the brain light up when kids from ages 12 to 14 are engaging in social media practices and trying to seek that social status and peer approval,” said Mallary Tenore, a journalism professor who specializes in social media’s influence on minors. “Because of brain development, it really can be detrimental for anyone under 16.” 

The fact that the danger presented by social media is based on biological changes demonstrates how universal the issue is. Even if one underage individual believes that they can responsibly use social media, they are still uniquely vulnerable to issues of self-esteem and addiction due to their stage of neurological development.

“Anyone on social media is exposed to a lot of content that tells them that they should change … the way that they look,” Tenore said. “The addictive qualities of social media can make it such that minors are really consuming this content at a rate that could be unhealthy for some of them, because they are favoring social media scrolling over actually interacting with their peers in person.”

Given the threat social media poses to minors, it’s understandable why people are calling for age verification measures to be implemented.

“There has been increasing demand from parents to have more accountability in relation to appropriate limits on kids’ use of social media,” informatics professor Ken Fleischmann said. This is something that a lot of parents, a lot of folks across the country have been asking for.”

Texas’ recent settlement with Facebook attempted to address these concerns. The settlement includes a $1 billion investment by Meta in Texas youth mental health and digital literacy programs and several new restrictions for teens, such as two-hour limits and hiding likes by default on posts. While the settlement claims to resolve key concerns of underage social media use, some are still unsatisfied due to Meta’s refusal to take responsibility for the harm it has caused.

“It bothers me that the underlying premise Meta was very deliberately designing its services to, (as the prosecution said), ensnare teenagers and youth into its services,” said Sharon Strover, journalism and media professor.

This inability to accept fault contributes to growing distrust in Meta and other social media platforms, which will become increasingly important as Meta implements its new age restriction policies. To determine a user’s age, Meta utilizes an artificial intelligence system that predicts age based purely on user profiles and activity. If the AI determines the profile belongs to an underage user, the account must undergo an age verification process. Yoti, a third-party platform, conducts the process by asking the user to upload their photo ID and then reviewing it.

Although Meta guarantees the efficiency and security of this process, there are still major concerns about false positives by the AI and invasions of privacy.

“I think I share the most obvious concern: once there is a facial image of somebody, where does that data go?” Strover said. 

Although Meta states the ID data will be deleted within 30 days, users are still unwilling to blindly trust these companies, questioning if their data is truly safe in Meta’s hands. Of course, Meta’s corporate history has not exactly inspired trust. 

“I could understand if some members of the public were skeptical, given some of the past whistleblowers and other situations where some of the business practices have been called into question,” Fleischmann said. 

There is not a clear resolution of this tradeoff between safety and privacy. The lack of effective alternatives for age verification is a fundamental obstacle. As Fleischmann explained, online age verification is increasingly difficult due to the prevalence of AI deepfakes and the ineffectiveness of self-identification.

Thus, this tradeoff presents a fork in the road for our society. While it’d be infeasible to rapidly create alternatives for ID verification, this does not mean we simply accept the solution Meta has presented to us. We must maintain the same active attitude of suspicion that forced Meta to implement these precautions in the first place, and be as stringent on the issue of privacy as we are on the safety of minors.

Stark is a chemical engineering sophomore from Orange County, California.

​