A couple of years ago, I went into Gorilla Tag to test it.
It looked like a game that was very friendly for kids. Cartoon gorillas, a game of tag. There really were no guidelines.
I played for about a minute. Then two or three little gorilla avatars came up to me, and one of them started cursing up a storm. He must have thought I was a little kid too.
The other kids were clearly too young to be there. You could hear it in their voices. They were shocked, and they were giggling. Then they started following him around while he explored his new vocabulary.
I stood there quietly. It wasn’t my place to jump in. I watched for 10 to 15 minutes while those kids played unfiltered, hearing and saying bad words.
I didn’t want my kids in that room.
I didn’t start Oculus Dad because of the games. I started it because I’d dealt with Facebook before.
In late 2013 I started running Facebook ads for Saatva, the mattress company. Then Physiclo and Iron Neck. I learned how the platform worked from the inside, and I made money with it.
Then it enshittified, to borrow Cory Doctorow’s word. It got worse and worse, a little every year. I slowly wound down my use of it.
So I’d watched the Cambridge Analytica lawsuits closely. In 2019 Facebook paid a $5 billion FTC penalty over it.
I enjoyed the Oculus. But my kids always asked to use it. They were very young and very impressionable, and my spider sense was tingling about how much money there is in letting content run amok. So before they played anything, I played it first. And I scored it.
Every Oculus Dad review ran the same card, out loud, on camera.
Best feature.
Worst feature.
Is it kid-friendly?
How long will it hold them?
A score out of five thumbs.
The kid-friendly question never had one answer. It depended on the child. Iron Man VR got five thumbs, but if your child is too short, they can’t reach what Tony Stark has to reach. Cubism got three and a half. My son was six and really into Lego, and he adopted it. I could tell parents it held my kids for 30 to 40 minutes a week.
Behind the short card was a longer one. Bad language. Whether the game had gates. Whether kids could talk to each other. That’s the one I used to tell my wife what our kids could play, what they couldn’t, and why, and to make sure whatever they played was teaching them something.
That’s the card Gorilla Tag failed. It’s a fun game. But I couldn’t let my kids into it.
To be fair to everyone involved: Gorilla Tag isn’t Meta’s game. Another Axiom makes it, and in May 2025 it added voice moderation with paid human moderators behind it. And Meta has been adding protections. It rolled out parental supervision tools for Quest in June 2022, built for teens. It opened parent-managed accounts for 10- to 12-year-olds in June 2023. In 2024 it let parents approve who those preteens could talk to, with voice chat off by default. If those kids were as young as they sounded, the rules were still catching up to who was actually in the room.
In 2020, Meta made a Facebook account mandatory to use an Oculus.
I had a Facebook account I didn’t want to use anymore. When I turned on the headset, I was forced back through that process again.
When my kids started playing, I didn’t want to share my password. So I looked into getting them their own Facebook accounts so they could log in. Facebook’s own rules say you have to be 13. It was my work on Oculus Dad that made me decide not to.
Meta dropped the rule in 2022.
That’s probably the reason the Oculus sits unused now. My kids can’t really use it on their own. A Steam account, a PlayStation, any other console I paid hundreds of dollars for, I can hand to my kids. This one asked for a social media account first.
On September 8, Meta launched Muse, a personal agent. It reads your email, sends messages on your behalf, makes purchases, and needs a card on file before you start.
Meta published real safeguards with it. A separate layer called Sentinel has to approve every action the agent takes, and the agent can’t override it. In Meta’s words: “Muse proposes actions, but only Sentinel can grant permission to perform action.”
The strongest protection is still on the way. Meta calls it Confidential VM: everything you do with Muse, encrypted with a key only you hold, “so not even Meta can access it.” Meta says a small group of trusted testers already has it and outside auditors have the source code. For everyone else, Meta says it plans to deliver it “later this year.”
Then Amazon blocked Muse from its store. Amazon says the agent doesn’t identify itself when it browses and “appears to capture and store customer credentials.” Meta has said Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods.”
Two of the biggest companies in the world, making opposite claims about the same software. I can’t check either one from my desk. Neither can any of us.
When a vendor tells me what it protects, every claim goes in one of three piles.
Live today.
Promised for later.
Said out loud.
Sentinel goes in the first pile. The Confidential VM goes in the second, with more evidence than most promises get. “No visibility into passwords” goes in the third. So does Amazon’s side of it, because Amazon sells its own shopping assistant and has reasons of its own to keep someone else’s agent out of its store.
Only the first pile counts. But the piles only tell me what a company says about today. To weigh the promise, I go back to the long card. What did this company choose the last time it had to pick between its users and its revenue?
Meta’s record is public.
In 2019, the $5 billion FTC penalty.
From 2020 to 2022, people who bought an Oculus to play games couldn’t turn it on without a Facebook account.
This March, a New Mexico jury found Meta had made false or misleading statements about children’s safety and ordered it to pay $375 million. Meta says it will appeal.
In August, Meta agreed to pay $16.7 billion to settle a case brought by 29 states over harm to children.
In December, Meta bought Manus, an agent I’d built part of my own workflow on. In April, Beijing ordered the deal unwound. Meta didn’t choose that part. But the people who built on Manus paid for it.
So far it’s cost me five or six hours figuring out what’s going on and reviewing my options. I’ll need another five to ten to pull out what I have sitting in Manus and work it into my own system. At what my time is worth, that’s thousands of dollars. And I haven’t even started on that second part, because of everything else on my plate.
That’s the cost nobody puts on the invoice. The frustration of a job that isn’t done. The mental load on top of the work I’ve already done and the work I still have to do. Or I give up on that information, which is even more frustrating.
Now picture that with an inbox, a calendar and a card on file.
None of that tells me what Meta will do with Muse. A company can change. Sentinel is a real piece of engineering, and I’d rather Meta ship it than not.
What the record tells me is how much proof to ask for before a promise moves into the first pile. When a company has chosen the money before, its promise needs evidence, not a date.
I hold every vendor to this, including the one I lean on most. Harlem Labs runs on Claude. Anthropic is the lab I pay the most every month, and I read its record with the same eyes.
In my class, The Operator’s Map, the first thing anyone builds is a one-page policy naming which tools are approved and what may never be pasted into them. The work under that page is the same card I ran for my kids: what’s live, what’s promised, what’s only been said, and what this company chose last time.
Amazon made its call at its own front door. I made mine in my living room years ago. Each of us gets to make our own.
Sources: FTC press release, Jul 24 2019 ($5B penalty) · Road to VR / Android Central (Oculus Facebook-login rule, 2020–2022) · Meta, “New Tools and Resources for Parents and Teens in VR and on Instagram,” Jun 14 2022 · CNN / Road to VR, Jun 2023 (Quest minimum age lowered to 10 with parent-managed accounts) · TechCrunch, Jul 10 2024 (parent-approved contacts for 10–12; voice chat off by default) · Cory Doctorow (“enshittification”) · Android Central, May 2025 (Gorilla Tag voice moderation, GGWP) · NPR / Al Jazeera, Mar 24–25 2026 (New Mexico verdict) · NBC News / Bloomberg / Forbes, Aug 26 2026 ($16.7B settlement with 29 states) · CNBC Jun 12 2026 and Manus, “A Note to Our Users” (Manus unwind) · GeekWire, Sep 21 2026 (Amazon blocks Muse) · Meta, “Security and safety for AI agents: our approach with Muse,” Sep 8 2026 · Meta newsroom, Sep 8 2026 (Confidential VM).