Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge
“The ability to know somebody’s age and try to protect privacy at the same time can be challenging,” says Meta’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis. Meta has been advocating for app store operators like Apple and Google to be in charge of verifying users’ ages and soliciting parental consent for app downloads. Now, it’s using its own virtual reality Quest store as a model for how it thinks that should work.
Meta is prompting Quest 2 and 3 users to reenter their birthdays so that it can place accounts in the appropriate age experience as it tries to centralize age verification through its Quest store. Teens aged 13 to 17 will have more privacy settings turned on by default and can be monitored through parental supervision tools….