They knew - just like they know people don't read EULAs. They didn't care because it was CYA action that took the bullseye off their collective backs. Those that pretended to care requested "credit card age verification" to improve their funnel conversion.
True age verification on the internet is a funny business. Unless we get some kind of government-backed ID, you have to trust what the user is telling you. It's a company's responsibility to take reported age seriously. Lying on age breaks the user agreement no one reads.
But if you tell the truth, and you're using an app designed for kids, your data will be protected according to the law, which is very pro-consumer.
In the end, if you choose to lie about your identity on the internet, that's your business.
As a millennial, I've always wondered about this. I'll hear coverage on NPR fairly regularly about the latest data breach, and I always feel like NPR is either a) pushing the outrage on me or b) assuming that I must be outraged, because I'm never outraged. I see pretty much everything I put online as public, even if there is a veil of privacy (like FB for example).
Edit: My guess you'd have to be millennial to think other generations didn't learn to lie to adults in a multitude of ways.
I bet most Millenials barely know what the bitcoin is and are hoping Ethereum is some cool new drug.
I absolutely agree with this. The issues mentioned are too real (forgetting your birthday, etc).
By far the most common consequence amongst my friends was to teach us to lie. (The second most common consequence was to shut us out of smaller websites that didn't want to deal with regulation - at least until we learned to lie.) "Are you under 13?" - duh, no. "Are you under 18?" - better answer no on that one too, to be safe. "How old are you?" - 20 is a good number. "What's your birthdate?" - how about Jan 1, 1970?
I had one friend who forgot her password to her Yahoo Mail account. "Why can't you just use the password reset functionality?" "I forgot which birthday I entered." "Why don't you call them up and have them reset it?" "I registered under a fake name too, and forgot what I put."
And she was one of the savvier ones. I saw a number of people post their street addresses, pictures of their house, vacations they were taking on the public Internet, but when it came to their ages, "I'm, uh, 24" (adding a decade and change).
People wonder why Millenials aren't more up-in-arms about data breaches and identity theft, and why they prefer pseudononymous currencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum over the real banking system with its KYC requirements. Maybe it's because we've been trained to see identity as temporary, reputation as something that can only be used against you, and information as something you give out to get what you want at the moment.