An Open Invitation to Meta, TikTok & YouTube
Within days of each other, two extraordinary settlements involving children’s online privacy and safety, $400 million involving TikTok and a proposed $18 billion involving Meta, have brought renewed attention to a question the digital industry has been grappling with for years:
How do we better recognize and protect young people online?
Age assurance is an important part of the answer. But knowing that a minor is present must lead to something: the appropriate privacy protections, permissions, parental involvement and age-appropriate experiences.
And we believe there is an even bigger question to address.
Should every digital service have to solve this independently — and should every family have to start over at every digital door?
For more than 25 years, PRIVO has worked on these challenges across children’s privacy, identity, age assurance and parental consent. We believe this moment presents an opportunity to think beyond individual platforms and toward more interoperable approaches that can work across the digital ecosystem.
That is the vision behind the Minors Protection Registry™ — giving parents greater agency while enabling participating services to recognize a privacy-preserving signal that a minor is present and determine what protections or permissions should follow.
Meta has called for an industry-wide solution. We agree.
So we are extending an open invitation to Meta, TikTok and YouTube — and to the broader digital ecosystem — to join the conversation.
A minor is present. Protection should follow.
