Meta lowers minimum age limit for VR headsets from 13 to 10

(Nweon June 17, 2023) In an official blog post, Meta announced that it would lower the minimum age limit for the Quest headset from the original 13 years old to 10 years old. Later this year, "parents will be able to set up parent-managed Quest 2 and Quest 3 accounts for their children ages 10 to 12," they wrote.

In the coming months, Meta will continue to work closely with the developer community to bring more apps and experiences suitable for this age group to the Quest platform.

For this announcement, Meta mainly introduced a new parent-managed account, but what is particularly noteworthy is that the account is mainly targeted at users aged 10 to 12 years old. In other words, Meta is lowering the minimum age limit for VR headsets from 13 to 10 years old. However, the company emphasized that Horizon Worlds, the metaverse social platform, still limits the minimum age to 13 years old.

Of course, Meta stated that it will adopt mandatory parental approval. Without parental approval, users of the stated age group will not be able to establish relevant accounts. At the same time, the company promises to continue to provide more tools and resources to ensure that users of the stated age groups have access to appropriate experiences in VR that can be easily managed by parents.

For new parent-managed accounts, they will include the following:

• Parent-managed content access: Parents will control whether their children can download or use an app, and parents can block access to an app at any time. To help parents decide whether to allow their children to use specific apps on the Meta Quest platform, all apps will provide a product description page that includes what data is collected, information about how said data is used, and whether the app has social features. Additionally, the page will provide relevant age ratings.
• Time limit control and screen casting: Parents will be able to manage how long their children can use each day. Additionally, the system will offer the ability to cast the VR experience to a phone or TV screen, so parents can monitor what their children are seeing while using the headset.
• Default privacy and security settings: User profiles managed by parents will automatically be set to private, meaning people will not be able to follow users aged 10, 11 and 12 years old without their or their parents' approval. In addition, the activity status and current app usage of users in the stated age group will be hidden by default unless parents choose to allow the sharing of information. Users in this age group will not be able to change the default privacy and security settings, only parents can.

Meta promises not to provide ads to users of this age group, and parents can choose whether the data collected can be used to improve the experience. Additionally, parents will be able to delete their child's account, including all data associated with it.

It should be noted that although the industry has begun to study the impact of XR on teenagers and children, since this is an emerging technology and the research time is limited, it is not yet clear whether XR will have any adverse effects on teenagers and children, and Proper time and method of use. In addition, although Meta has promised to continue working with experts, it has not released much research evidence yet.

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