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Comment by miltonlaxer | Hacker News Reader

The aggressive push for ID verification is a direct result of massive government lawsuits regarding online child safety. As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.

Plus they already have all that data... Your ID is not private information. It's an identifier that they don't need or want.

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I think the causality is a bit mixed up here given Meta have put millions of dollars into child safety lobbying

What's their motive there?

I'm honestly not sure. Often when companies lobby for regulation it's to avoid other types of regulation they would find more troublesome. I don't buy the popular narrative that Meta is lobbying for verification laws for the purpose of getting ID data because surely they have a lot of signal there already. At the same time I think it's backwards to say "Meta are behaving this way because of regulation" when they actively lobbied for it.

Obviously, none of us have any proof, but I'm on board with the theory that they've been lobbying for it to push things subtly. Specifically because it looks like a lot of these laws are being made to absolve the person creating the gate of responsibility and liability when the gate is there, even if it fails. The idea of the theory being that if they can push that part in then it's better off for them rather than if it's done in a vacuum where they can end up responsible.

It makes it impossible for anyone except huge existing players to have a legal social network if there are enough hoops to jump through to run one.

Smaller entrants to the field cannot as easily comply with the law. It’s about raising barriers to entry. Trust in Meta might be low here, but to the general public, it’s higher than some small startup they’ve never heard of, so they won’t upload their ids there.

I linked to two articles describing Meta's fight to have age verification laws put into place (even before the settlement). The most obvious reason is to try to get some sort of law in place that they believe they can comply with _without_ having to make changes to their algorithms in a way that might hurt their business.

I don't think they particularly _want_ legal id (though maybe they do? who knows)... but it's obviously false that this was caused by the government when Meta itself was lobbying for such laws even before then.

https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...

https://thedeepdive.ca/who-pushes-age-verification-bills/

Creates another expensive bar for prospective challengers to clear - regulation nearly always ends up favouring incumbents, especially if they have a hand in shaping it.

Facebook was doing ID checks well before this because they want to stop ban evasion.

ID checks just came to the Quest because they forced facebook accounts which already had ID checks on it. They should never have made facebook accounts mandatory for playing games.

> As a strict condition of this settlement, Meta is legally mandated to enforce hard age gates.

Not for allowing you to use your own hardware, what utter nonsense.

It was their choice to forcibly link their hardware to their online account system despite it working fine without it. But it’s absolutely not true that the government requires age verification for using VR goggles.

Yeah, you beat me to this - I laughed at Meta needing any information considering shadow profiles have always existed and every company leaks data like a sieve xD

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