What the settlement left out: Meta can still collect data from kids

Filed 43m ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Five Card Shuffle

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Ginelly.Q · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Meta agreed in August 2026 to pay up to $17.1 billion over 10 years to settle claims from 47 states that it designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive and harmful to youth mental health, alongside promises of time limits and scroll-break interruptions.

The settlement does not restrict Meta from continuing to collect data from young users or from using that data to serve them targeted ads, leaving its core advertising business model untouched. Meta generated over $200 billion in revenue last year, up 22%, largely from surveillance-based advertising.

This is not Meta's first such settlement: it paid $5 billion to the FTC in 2019 after violating a 2012 agreement, then was accused again in 2023 of violating that 2019 settlement, with litigation over data restrictions still ongoing.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Paying a fine that's smaller than the profit from the bad behavior is just a cost of doing business, and Meta has now done this business three times running. A company that keeps getting caught breaking its promises and keeps writing new promises anyway isn't reforming, it's just budgeting. The kids still get tracked, the advertisers still get their targets, and the settlement gets a press release.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Five Card Shuffle · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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