The Download

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Craig T Fruchtman/Getty Images

TL;DR: Yesterday, Meta settled a landmark trial around teen social media addiction—and it might be popping champagne right about now. The settlement lets Meta avoid a drastic redesign of its apps and could potentially give it an edge over rivals. The cherry on top: Meta gets to paint itself as an industry leader on protecting kids—while pushing much of the onus onto parents.

What happened: Perhaps the biggest sign that this was a positive outcome for Meta: Its stock immediately rallied after the news broke. The social media giant has agreed to pay about $12.7 billion to the 47 states that joined the settlement agreement (plus a separate $1 billion payment to Texas)—and could cough up about $5 billion more if TikTok, YouTube, and Snap agree to some of the safety measures Meta will now be bound to.

Whichever amount it ends up paying is just a tiny slice of the company’s annual profit last year ($60.4 billion)—and it’ll be paid over 10 years. Reminder: Meta was telling the world that states were seeking as much as $1.4 trillion—an amount that’s a whole lot more than $18 billion, but would have been ruinous for the company considering its market cap is…$1.4 trillion. (Though it still faces other litigation around teen safety.)

Meanwhile, even the restrictions Meta agreed to implement don’t go far enough, critics say. And the big elephant in the room: If teen social media bans around the world are any indication, underage users might figure out ways to swerve these restrictions anyway.

Limits (with caveats): Many of the new safety measures focus on time limits. By default, users under 18 in the US will be blocked from using Meta’s social apps at night and be limited to two hours of scrolling per day. But features like autoplay and algorithmic feeds won’t be disabled by default, though they can be turned off. (There’s also a grab bag of exceptions, like DMs and long-form content—anything of at least 22 minutes—being excluded from the daily use limits.) Parents can also lift or tweak many of these settings.

A big W for Meta?: Crucially, if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap agree to similar restrictions, Meta will set the daily time limit for under 18s in the US to just one hour. The average American teen browses Instagram for about 66 minutes per day, per Meta—lower than what they spend on YouTube (almost two hours) and TikTok (about an hour and a half)—so this would mark a huge win for Zuck’s company.

Bottom line: If Meta can pressure its competitors to adopt comparable measures, it’ll essentially give up six minutes of screen time per user while they lose up to an hour—and it gets to make off looking like the good guy. —WK

      

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I can see clearly now

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Windows are a bedeviling cleaning conundrum. The task itself requires little: a soft cloth, cleaning solution, elbow grease. But unless you reside in a particularly squatty dwelling, this simple chore can get dangerous and involved in a hurry, necessitating stools, ladders, telescoping squeegees, and probably a hose.

When Ecovacs’ line of window-cleaning robots crossed my radar, I was intrigued. To date, I’ve paid to have the exterior windows of my suburban Pittsburgh home cleaned by professionals twice a year. It has worked well enough, but (largely bird-induced) smudges and grime reappear quickly. Could a robot be the answer to spotless windows?

How I tested this: The Winbot I tested was actually two pieces tethered together: the “station” that pops open to wet the cleaning pad and scrub the grime off between cleanings, and the bot that does the scrubbing.

Once the bot is ready to clean, you press it against your window. Fans whir, and the station announces the bot is “firmly attached.” It is terrifying and exhilarating. From there, it’s hands-off: The robot glides across the window like an old-school screensaver, shooting out jets of cleaning fluid and wiping the window clean.

I cleaned nine windows on the first floor of my home in a little under two hours, and then took it to my father-in-law’s to test it on a floor-to-ceiling window in his living room.

The Good: The Winbot did a solid job on all the exterior windows in my family room, which is surrounded by trees and therefore birds and therefore bird poop. Months ago, I’d resigned myself to smudges until my next professional clean (after I hosed off a good bit of bird droppings), but the Winbot scrubbed them right off. It works!

The Complicated: Running the Winbot is a pretty involved process, and there are a few caveats that could render it useless depending on how your house is set up. For one, the “station” has to be on smooth, level ground—not carpet or tile—because there is a suction cup on the bottom that tethers it to the floor. I get that this is a valuable safety feature if you’re cleaning the exterior windows of, say, a high-rise apartment in New York, but for houses like mine, where there is zero risk of it falling on a pedestrian, it’s overkill. (We set it on a piece of whiteboard in my father-in-law’s carpeted living room.)

The Bad: Some streaks are visible when evening and morning light hits the windows. And at a sticker price of nearly $600, it’ll be well over a year before the Winbot pays for itself in lieu of my professional cleaners. Schlepping the station from room to room and cleaning the pad between washes is time-consuming, particularly if you have small windows. Unless frogs and locusts start falling from the sky, you’re likely not going to use the Winbot more than a few times a year, so ideally you have a surfeit of storage space to tuck away the sizable (and somewhat heavy) home helper between uses.

Verdict: Noise ❌ —AS

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The Zeitbyte

Love at first background check

Morning Brew Inc.

Online dating can be a minefield of stranger danger—one that some people navigate by doing forensic-level googling of anyone they talk to on a dating app. But now there’s a service called Stud or Dud (apparently marketed toward women who date men) that does the deep digging for you, from the data broker behind PeopleFinders. All you need is a phone number or a name and rough location, and it’ll dredge up public records you could probably find on any regular people search platform: criminal records, bankruptcy filings, social media posts, and more.

What’s different is how Stud or Dud presents it all: Every search result tallies how many “red” or “green” flags the person has—prison time definitely counts as the former, though what earns a green remains a mystery. You can scope out whatever property and assets they own, mark profiles as a “stud” or a “dud”—and, naturally, there’s a built-in AI chatbot for dispensing dating tips.

PeopleFinders claims that “Is my date a serial killer?” sleuthing was already a huge use case for its flagship people search site; now the urge to know everything about a new beau is just streamlined, with a $20 price tag for its top monthly subscription tier. As for those who want to know if their Tinder match is running this kind of dossier service on them—you’re out of luck. The site says that searches are “100% private.” —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: ☕☕☕/5

• Apple has announced the date and time of its fall product release event—here’s what you need to know before September 9.
• Flock is under investigation by a Republican senator. In a five-page letter, he says Congress “never authorized the network your industry has built” and requests a ton of documents and answers to questions.
• 404 Media has a first-person account of what exactly is going on in Amazon’s secret book-destroying warehouse from someone it says works there.
• The official reports about OpenAI’s agent hack of Hugging Face are here, and in almost 130 pages, they paint a very grim picture of just how messed up the whole thing apparently is—but experts are calling BS.
• Twitter is back! Well, kind of—and it does have some interesting new features.
• Some people unexpectedly got free upgrades to the new Mac mini models.
• All that AI spending Big Tech hasn’t disclosed publicly? A Morgan Stanley analysis shows it could be as high as $3 trillion.

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