I support this week’s $17 billion Meta settlement and congratulate Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark and her office for their work to see it through. I also know the office that just won this case is not staffed to keep winning. Companies are making money off addictive features and privacy abuses at a scale that dwarfs this settlement number. It is a drop in the bucket of what Vermonters should be able to expect. Vermont should use a fraction of its $92.7 million to build a privacy and digital protection division inside the Attorney General’s Office.
This settlement blocks nighttime use for minors, caps daily use at two hours, adds a school mode, improves age verification for children under 13, and turns off like counts and beauty filters. With key support from Vt. State Rep. Michael Marcotte (R-Orleans-Lamoille), who chairs the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development, and Vt. State Sen. Wendy Harrison (D-Windham), who chairs the Senate Committee on Institutions, I led and wrote stronger provisions into last year’s Vermont Age-Appropriate Design Code (Act 63, nicknamed The Vermont Kids Code) which goes into effect January 1, 2027. The law applies to every covered business, not just one company. It does not expire in 10 years, and its protections are legal duties, not settings a company can adjust later.
This settlement also leaves recommendation algorithms running. Fairplay, the national children’s safety organization led by Vermonter Josh Golin, called that its biggest disappointment. Meanwhile, our law bars companies from using a minor’s data to rank or push content unless that young person asked for it, and it requires privacy settings to start at their strongest.
The settlement turns off push notifications during the school day. Ours turns them off by default and bans them between midnight and 6 a.m. This settlement requires better age checking. Our law says how: collect only what is strictly necessary, delete it immediately, never reuse it, allow appeals. Parents can switch some settlement protections off. Vermont’s duty of care cannot be switched off.
This settlement money flows into a fund controlled by the Legislature. Nearly everyone I have talked with, here and in other states, wants it directed to youth mental health. I support that. I also want us to look at the broader system at play. Meta is not the only offender, and these harms reach well past our kids.
This settlement, and social media more broadly, is one piece of a much bigger set of issues. A 2025 study found some online grocery shoppers were shown prices up to 23 percent higher than others for the same basket, roughly $1,200 a year for a family of four. The FBI reports Americans 60 and older lost $7.7 billion to internet crime last year, up 60 percent. Online advertisers will lose more than $100 billion to ad fraud this year, much of it paid by small and independent businesses for clicks that were never human. Rents are set by pricing software. Medical bills run through automated systems. Every device we own, wear, and drive records us, and brokers sell those records to the employer deciding whether to hire us and the bank deciding whether to lend to us. Vermonters are being taken advantage of and having their information sold, usually without any idea it is happening.
Many of my bills have been aimed at exactly these harms: surveillance pricing, companion chatbots, wearable and neural technology, and a growing list covering AI transparency, disclosure, and liability. With the federal level in gridlock, every bit of industry attention and lobbying pressure has turned to the states. We cannot sit back and hope it works out while tech lobbyists hand us their preferred version of regulation which undermines each of us. At the same time, lobbyists are exerting pressure to remove private rights of action, meaning that Vermonters cannot directly sue a company that harms them. Every bill that passes without one relies solely on the Attorney General’s Office. We can work as hard as we want to pass strong consumer protection laws, but if the office enforcing them has inadequate staffing and expertise, all we have made are policies that nobody will follow.
A section of this year’s privacy bill that did not survive would have built a privacy and digital protection division inside the Attorney General’s Office. Let’s build it. The cost would be a small share of what Meta just paid and would fund a team focused entirely on consumer protection in digital technology. That division could carry out technology policy rulemaking, take the data broker registry out from under the Secretary of State, run the EdTech registry we passed this year, expand it to artificial intelligence, and keep joining multistate enforcement so Vermont brings money home instead of watching money get made off of each of us.
The Attorney General took on one of the largest companies in the world and won. Now it is on the Legislature and the Governor to make sure she is not doing it shorthanded. Establish the division, fund the staff, and give that office the expertise to investigate what is happening to Vermonters and the capacity to act. Let’s protect Vermonters for every moment they are online and off.
Monique Priestley (D-Bradford) is a Vermont State Representative serving on House Commerce & Economic Development. She is currently running to represent Orange County in the Vermont State Senate.