Meta drops the age requirement for its Quest headset to ten.
The company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claimed in 2021 that the virtual reality programme was not suitable for kids under the age of 13 but has U-turned on this belief by allowing parents to create and monitor an account for their VR offering when it comes to kids 12 and under.
In a blog post, they wrote: “With new parent-managed Meta accounts, we’re making it easier for parents to create and manage their family’s accounts on one device. We’ll require preteens to get their parent’s approval to set up an account, which will give parents control over the apps their preteens download from our app store. When parents share their preteen’s age with us, we’ll use this information to provide age-appropriate experiences across our app store. For example, we’ll only recommend age-appropriate apps.”
The accounts will allow for “age-appropriate" settings”, and the data will be handled differently than their adult user counterparts. Along with this, they have announced a ‘Family Center’, a space for caretakers to monitor their kids’ use of other Meta wares like Instagram, Facebook and so on after backlash kids were using the sites without parental permission.
The blog post continued: “With new parent-managed accounts, parents can go to Family Center to get started and set up an account for their preteen. We’ll continue to collaborate with parents, experts, and leaders in the privacy and data protection community to inform our approach designing age-appropriate experiences. We’ll have more to share in the months ahead.”
