Facebook recently rolled out Messenger Kids. At first glance, it's a well-intentioned, innocent effort—an ad-free messaging app with strict parental controls that protects kids from predators, pornography, and a thousand other online ills.
But you might be giving away much more than you're getting when signing up your child for Messenger Kids. Ask yourself: Why would a company that has built an empire on digital ads offer a free app that displays no ads? Here's the give and take.
What You Get
Messenger Kids gives near-full control to parents. You have to install and activate the app on your kid's device with your own Facebook account. Also, your children aren't alllowed to manage their own contacts—only you can specify with whom they communicate. This prevents your kids from falling prey to pedophiles and other predators who lurk in social media networks.
Facebook also clearly states: "There are no ads in Messenger Kids and your child's information isn't used for ads. It is free to download and there are no in-app purchases. Messenger Kids is also designed to be compliant with the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA)."
Messenger Kids is packed with fun, safe features for your kids, including "specially chosen GIFs, frames, stickers, masks and drawing tools" that let them "decorate content and express their personalities," as Facebook's announcement says.
What Zuck Gets
Facebook gets a lot more out of Messenger Kids than you do. For starters, it locks you into its platform, since you need a Facebook account to set up your child's Messenger Kids account, manager their contacts, and chat with them.
It also gives Facebook a workaround to COPPA. Mark Zuckerberg has never been a fan of COPPA and has said he will challenge the regulation at some point. It prohibits online services such as Facebook from collecting data from children under the age of 13—unless their parents consent to it. And that's exactly what you're doing when you use your own Facebook account to register your kid with Messenger Kids.
Its privacy-policy page shows how much data Messenger Kids collects about your kids, the devices they use to access Messenger Kids, and how they use the app. It also states that it can share the data with third parties to help improve Messenger Kids. Zuck wasn't able to change the law, so now he's now using you, the parents, to circumvent it.
Facebook also says that it won't serve ads to your children while they use Messenger Kids. But that doesn't mean it won't use their data to better understand you, their parents, and serve more personalized and profitable ads to you.
To its credit, Facebook won't automatically upgrade your child's Messenger Kids account to Facebook when they turn 13. But it doesn't need to, because it has already locked your family into its platform, and they'll likely create a Facebook account on their own, possibly even before they're 13. As kids grow up, Facebook will have plenty of time to create a digital profile of their tastes and preferences and ripen them for monetization. By the time kids migrate to the main platform, Facebook will have so much data about them that it'll be able to immediately integrate them into its huge money-making machine.
What Should You Do?
In its defense, Messenger Kids does a pretty good job of protecting kids from things they're "not developmentally prepared for," as one children's psychology expert who helped Facebook develop the app told the Guardian.
But that's true only as long as your kids remain in Messenger Kids. Nothing stops them from signing up for Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and other social-media networks with the same device they use for Messenger Kids once they hit the age of 13 (or lie about their age). In fact, Messenger Kids will probably whet children's appetite for the more extensive features of other platforms, most prominently Facebook itself.
So what you'll get, at most, is the false impression that your kid is totally safe online. Meanwhile, Facebook gets more users and the chance to gobble up your data and those of your kids, which translates to dollars. Imagine how many gray t-shirts Zuck will be able to buy with all that money.
And Facebook's history in handling user data paints a grim picture. A leaked report in May revealed that Facebook was considering allowing advertisers to target teenagers when they felt "insecure," "worthless" and "in need of a confidence boost." A few years earlier, Facebook caused another uproar when it published the results of a mass experiment that involved manipulating the emotions of nearly 700,000 unsuspecting users by altering the content of their news feeds.
I could be wrong; Messenger Kids might be a sincere effort to make the internet safer for the young. But until Facebook takes some concrete measures to prove that its goals go beyond deepening its own pockets, I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt.