[ruairispain]

So many children using it. Wonder what the EU law is on data privacy and under age kids? Can under-18s legally sign this snooped data over to FB?

Hope some lawyers can stop this in its tracks. Otherwise Signal or some other service will get our business

[Number157]

Don't know about kids but I think there is some requirement that people can meaningfully say no. Seems this is a breach of such a requirement.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

[etherealG]

Sadly the law is written in a way that let’s the optional part be disregarded if the business considers the data that’s being shared necessary to run its business model... and advertising companies like Facebook will argue all data can help them sell ads better or for more money, hence all sharing of data shouldn’t need to be optional. This has yet to be tested in court, but both google and Facebook have taken this approach in their implementation of gdpr, leaving us wondering what the point was anyway... law without teeth :( the eu should have already slapped down google hard for their lack of an opt out, but it’s been years and still nothing. Seems the law makers aren’t really on the side of privacy after all.

[MattJ100]

Last I checked WhatsApp minimum age was 16 (in the EU at least) to comply with the regulations.

Obviously that doesn't stop (many, many...) just using it anyway. But Facebook will happily turn a blind eye to this unless their hand is forced.

[distances]

Here all the kids use it as soon as they get a phone. If they can't write yet they'll send emojis (!!). The minimum age is just a meaningless smoke screen.

[jwr]

Yes, usage by kids is a real problem. My child is one of only two in the class that doesn't use WhatsApp. All the others do. They have what they call a "class group", even though not everyone is there.

When I try to tell parents how much Facebook learns about their kids (their friends, networks, and by merging data from different sources: habits, school, frequented locations, etc), they just roll their eyes. The response is "well everybody is tracking us, who cares".

All this even though there is Signal, which works JUST FINE.

[kar1181]

Children luckily are much more flexible and chop and change with the wind. It's the older folks once something is established it ends up becoming bedrock and super hard to change. Parents/Adults are busy if something 'works', there's a lot of resistance to changing it.