Facebook‘s parent company Meta disabled only a small fraction of the over one million reports it received of underage users on Instagram since early 2019, a lawsuit filed by 33 US states reportedly said. The newly unsealed legal complaint accused the tech giant of carrying an “open secret” that it had millions of users under the age of 13, and that Instagram “routinely continued to collect” their personal information such as location without parental permission. The complaint stated that within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users were under the age of 13 was an “open secret” that was routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public, according to a New York Times report. Last month, attorneys general from 33 states, including New York’s AG Letitia James, filed a lawsuit against Meta alleging that the tech giant designed harmful features contributing to the country’s youth mental health crisis. The lawsuit alleged Meta created addictive and “psychologically manipulative” features targeting young people while assuring the public falsely that the platform was safe to use. “Meta has profited from children’s pain by intentionally designing its platforms with manipulative features that make children addicted to their platforms while lowering their self-esteem,” Ms James said. Meta’s spokesperson responded to the lawsuit, saying that the company was committed to providing teens with “safe, positive experiences online,” and that it had already introduced “over 30 tools to support teens and their families” such as age verification and preventing content promoting harmful behaviours. “We’re disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path,” the spokesperson added. However, a significant portion of the evidence provided by the states was obscured from public view via redactions in the initial filing. The new unsealed complaint filed last week provided fresh insights from the lawsuit, including the accusation that Instagram “coveted and pursued” underage users for years and that Meta “continually failed” to make effective age-checking systems a priority. The lawsuit reportedly argued that Meta chose not to build effective systems to detect and exclude underage teen users, viewing them as a crucial next generation demographic it needed to capture. It also accused the tech giant of “automatically” ignoring some reports of under 13 users and allowing them to continue using the platform while knowing about such cases via the company’s internal reporting channels. The company responded that the now publicly revealed complaint “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.” It said verifying the ages of its users was a “complex” challenge especially with younger people who likely do not have IDs or licenses. Meta recently said it supports federal legislation requiring app stores to get parents’ approval whenever their teens under 16 download apps. “With this solution, when a teen wants to download an app, app stores would be required to notify their parents, much like when parents are notified if their teen attempts to make a purchase,” the company said. “Parents can decide if they want to approve the download. They can also verify the age of their teen when setting up their phone, negating the need for everyone to verify their age multiple times across multiple apps,” it said. The tech giant holds that the best solution to support young people is a “simple, industry-wide solution” where all apps are held to the same standard. “By verifying a teen’s age on the app store, individual apps would not be required to collect potentially sensitive identifying information,” Meta recently said. Read More Russia places Meta spokesperson on wanted list Meta to allow users to delete Threads accounts without losing Instagram Nasa has received a signal from 10 million miles away Nasa has received a signal from 10 million miles away Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’

Apple’s new iPhone 15 will feature at least one new upgrade aimed at the upcoming Vision Pro headset, according to a report. The new iPhone is due out in September, and Apple has said little about it. But as the release nears, more reports are leaking out from the company’s supply chain that indicate its features. One of those may be a new “ultra wide band” or UWB chip that is looking ahead to Apple’s Vision Pro, according to a new report from reputable analyst Ming-chi Kuo. The chip will allow the phone and the headset to be able to work together, he suggested, as part of a “more competitive ecosystem”. “The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including the integration with other Apple hardware products, and related main hardware specifications are Wi-Fi and UWB,” he wrote on a post on Twitter. “iPhone 15 will likely see an specification upgrade of UWB, with the production process moving from 16nm to more advanced 7nm, allowing for improved performance or reduced power consumption for nearby Interactions.” The U1 chip is used give the iPhone and other devices better spatial awareness, so that they can find other objects more precisely. It is not clear what features that integration may provide for either the iPhone or the Vision Pro. Mr Kuo’s reports tend to focus on leaks from Apple’s hardware pipeline, rather than its software, so tend to reveal more about the physical nature of a product rather than how exactly it will be used. Apple’s U1 UWB chip first arrived in the iPhone 11, and has been in every iPhone since. It has rolled out more widely, to the Watch and HomePod as well as the AirTags and AirPods Pro. Initially, it was somewhat unclear what Apple intended to the U1 chip to do. But over time it released a number of products – such as those AirTags and AirPods Pro – which can be found with the phone, and rely on the UWB for more precise location. Mr Kuo also indicated that next year’s phone, the iPhone 16, will come with a new WiFi chip that will be “more conducive to Apple’s integration of hardware products running on the same local network and provide a better ecosystem experience”. Read More Man locked out of smart home for a week after he was accused of being racist Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Can Apple make us love virtual reality? | You Ask The Questions

PARIS France's government is not considering nationalising IT consulting group Atos, a finance ministry source said on Monday

By Siddharth Cavale NEW YORK Walmart's Flipkart marketplace and PhonePe payments business in India could be $100 billion

MANILA Analog chipmaker Texas Instruments is planning to invest up to $1 billion to expand its Philippine facilities,

If your dog cries in the presence of a high-value treat or toy, know they’re following their natural instincts.

The US is getting its first commercial facility to soak up carbon dioxide from the ambient air for

Okta projected third-quarter revenue above market estimates on Wednesday, a sign that demand for its identity authentication services

The UK is set to have less coal-fired electricity available this winter as two operators have started to

Facebook parent Meta on Wednesday beat market expectations for quarterly earnings powered by a reviving...

By Chris Prentice, David Lawder and Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) -Binance chief Changpeng Zhao stepped down and pleaded guilty

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many controversial users who were previously banned from the platform have been allowed back on and are flourishing. Users such as Andrew Tate have regained a platform to spout his harmful views to millions of users. But, while it may feel satisfying to troll such users, engaging with their tweets actually earns them money. Here’s why: Twitter recently announced it was paying out thousands of dollars in advertising revenue to users to “benefit” from their high engagement on tweets, earning more money the higher their engagement is. As part of Twitter’s Ad Revenue sharing program, users require “5M+ Tweet impressions in each month for the last 3 months”. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter On Thursday (13 July), some eligible users began receiving notifications of how much money they would receive. The highest earner, Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, known online as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, earned $37,050. Tate also revealed in a tweet that he earned $20,379 from ad revenue generated in the reply threads under his posts. The money comes from the ad revenue generated in their replies below the content they post on the platform, and is paid out via the Stripe account that the user registered for creator subscriptions with. Twitter staffer, Patrick Traughber, said: “Excited to start sending our first payments to creators for ads revenue sharing today. “Creators are the lifeblood of this platform, and it's great to see so many creators I follow getting paid today. The program will be expanding soon—more to come!” The cash payouts come just a week after Meta launched its rival text-based platform, Threads. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.