Antigone Davis: "Was there a discussion on using 25 as the default? We get hammered on this issue quite a bit on the safety side. It is seen as a signal to age lie. Not a safety issue, but it also seems likely to create an even greater mismatch census data to ads targeting."
Shane ████: "25 has been the default on most surfaces for a while. iOS is the outlier. It was supposed to be fixed a long time ago and just never went out. On most of the surfaces we have a pop-up that asks you to confirm that 25 is really your birthday if you don't bother to change it."
Antigone Davis: "And yes, I get we use 25 and this is a consistency issue but rather than push for 25 everywhere, I'd encourage us to think about present date everywhere or other options if that has real cost. The current 25 default creates real costs on the policy side and is cited to us with some frequency."
Shane ████: "I've done a fair bit of pushing on the 25 point and have gotten resistance. The age gate change seemed like it would be bigger impact for us, so I've focused on getting that cleared. I'll push a bit more on understanding the impact, but I think it's significant. It's also just a pain to enter birthdays starting from 0, so there is a UI/user reason for defaulting to something closer to the mean age. Is there another age that you think would be better? Our general advice has been that it can't be close to 13."
Shane ████: "They're fine to wait. The age gating was entirely for policy—they'd rather not ship it. Having inconsistent default ages creates some issues for them, but probably as much an issue for us as it's hard to explain why we have different behavior on android & iOS.
I think we can do some more due diligence internally, but I don't think we should talk to external stakeholders until we get a better sense of the cost of changing these and how willing growth is to make changes."
Antigone Davis: "On 25, safety folks find the 25 default objectionable and would prefer no default. The default makes age lying more passive. Are they open to testing how no default impacts sign ups? Do they have data that with no default fewer people sign up or more people lie?"
Shane ████: "Getting pressure from the growth team to try to close out the default age at account creation as they'd like to get all our surfaces on the same default. The estimated impact of defaulting everyone to 0 is > 10M MAPMAPMonthly Active PeopleCore Meta engagement metric counting distinct people active on a platform in a month. Paired with DAP in internal goal-setting; the MAP/DAP ratio is used as a measure of how frequently a monthly user returns.Full entry ↗. As part of the review of age practices we're doing I think we're likely to suggest doing this, but I don't think we're locked on that position and it will obviously take some discussion. Given that the AoC workstream is still being discussed, I'm recommending that we just hold things the way they are until we make a decision.
That said, if Growth insists on doing something, I don't see the risk as that high of moving iOS into alignment with Android and our other surfaces. But if you feel strongly, I can try to hold them. Let me know."
Shane ████: "Sorry. iOS is currently 0 and they want to make default 25. Cost of moving all surfaces to 0 is > 10M MAP yearly."
Antigone Davis: "To be clear, you are asking if I am okay letting growth move iOS default to 25 like it is everywhere else just until we come back to them with an informed global recommendation (e.g., policy recommends we default everybody to 0)? And the likely recommendation from policy will be to default everybody to 0?"
Shane ████: "Basically. I'm not positive policy will win the discussion of setting the default to 0, but, yes, wanted to see if you were ok with us going to a consistent approach of 25 for the moment until we can make a company decision on a long-term approach."
Antigone Davis: "I guess so but I am inclined to use the discrepancy to ask them to explain why they have selected 25 – especially if we are going to lose the 0 option down the road and likely end up with 25 due to inertia. This approach has totally screwed up what we know about people's ages both for safety and ads targeting and if the idea is that we lose some people by forcing them to input info and we want a default let's at least universally default to an age under 18 so we accidentally over safeguard rather than under safeguard. That might not fix our ads targeting issues but it will help with safety and privacy."
Meta & Children's Online Safety