Over the years, lawmakers at the state and federal level have tried a variety of measures aimed at making children safer on the Internet, from child-friendly design standards to age verification for individual websites. Recently, a new model has been taking hold in the states and now it’s gaining momentum in Congress: putting the onus on app stores across the country.
The new approach to age verification mandates mobile app stores to verify users’ age, then send that information to apps when users download them. The idea has been around for a while, but just this year the first of these laws was passed in Utah, with versions passed in several other states soon after. On Tuesday, it surfaced in Congress as part of a package of child protection legislation in the form of the App Store Accountability Act (ASA), which was first introduced by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and Representative John James (R-MI).
The bill is set to be discussed at a hearing before a powerful House committee that is considering a larger package of children’s online safety bills. This comes just as Bill has picked up a new industry champion, Pinterest. Companies like Meta, Snap and X have also expressed broad support for the App Store approach and applauded it when the federal bill was introduced.
The ASA may not be the most prominent bill in the House package, which is headlined by the amended Kids Online Safety Act (COSA), but it represents an approach that has so far resonated in both red and blue states. Proponents may soon find out how effective it is in court, too – a version of the law in Texas is currently facing a legal challenge. Like other age verification bills, opponents like tech industry associations CCIA are suing to block the Texas law, saying such a measure would violate the First Amendment by stymieing large-scale legal speech. Supreme Court upholds age verification laws for porn websites, but bans age-gating Everyone The app is a separate legal issue that has yet to be considered.
Widespread age verification has proven controversial even outside the US. The UK’s Online Security Act began requiring it in July, causing a number of problems as users found workarounds and expressed security concerns about handing over government-issued IDs or facial scans. Moving verification to the app store level may alleviate some concerns, but some privacy and security experts have concluded that there is no way to completely avoid the risk of disclosing sensitive information.
The bill’s sponsors present it as a straightforward solution
But the bill’s sponsors present it as a straightforward solution — a “general measure,” Representative Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), co-sponsor of the House version, points out. The Verge In a statement. Representative James says the bill simply “holds Big Tech companies to the same standard as local corner stores.” in an interview with The Verge, Sen. Lee expressed confidence in the bill’s ability to withstand First Amendment challenges — a position he did not specifically hold regarding the Senate version of COSA, which focuses on a duty of care stripped from a new House discussion draft that would hold platforms responsible for reducing harm to children.
Lee was one of three senators who opposed COSA during a vote in the Senate last year. That version of COSA “doesn’t do the job it needs to do to address some of the most significant threats to children online, and it potentially opens the door to it turning into political censorship by the federal government,” he explains. The Verge. He worries that pornographic material could still slip through the cracks to reach children – something he hopes to resolve with a separate bill mandating age verification for porn sites – and that the definition of mental health impairment in the bill could be codified by a mainstream medical association that recognizes gender dysphoria as a diagnosis. Lee’s concerns about COSA are shared with some progressive groups who have opposed it on similar grounds, including fears that it will be used to censor transgender users, although as his concern about the medical association shows, their concerns differ dramatically in specifics.
For industry proponents of the app store approach, placing the burden of age verification on app store operators could relieve some of the burden of responsibility for their own platforms as well as many other app developers. But they also argue that it will be far easier for consumers to navigate the policy rather than having to individually verify across multiple different apps and share more data with each of them. The support from Pinterest and others “makes a big difference,” Lee says. Even supportive statements from META, whose officials often become targets of bipartisan anger when testifying on Capitol Hill, help balance the issue. “I don’t know of anyone who has said, ‘Well, if META supports this kind of effort, I can’t possibly do it,'” Lee says. “I think the majority of people at most of these companies probably want to protect children.”
Lee would still welcome the support of Apple and Google, the two companies that would be most immediately affected by his legislation. But both companies have expressed concerns over proposals that require sharing data with developers beyond their understanding. “This will have a huge impact on anyone running an App Store, whether before or after the bill passes,” says Lee, who was happy to see a recent update by Apple to give parents more control over children’s accounts.
A fearsome patchwork of standards could persuade more companies to get on board
As the App Store age verification model spreads through the states, companies are starting to see a terrifying patchwork of standards that might convince more of them to come up with a version they can live with. With the passage of California’s version of the App Store age reporting law, the landscape of state bills has already begun to become more diverse.
The California law has some distinctive features, such as limiting enforcement to the Attorney General. It also does not require app stores to independently verify the reported age of users. Instead, they require users to indicate their date of birth on the device when downloading an app and send age limit signals to app developers. Developers who discover that a user’s age differs from that provided by the App Store are not protected from disregarding that information by relying solely on App Store signals. Those differences helped it choose Google as a backer, although Apple has not yet made a similar move.
“The need for a federal standard is urgent,” Pinterest CEO Bill Ready wrote in a letter to James, the federal bill’s House sponsor, announcing the company’s support. “A single national approach will reduce fragmentation while giving families one easy place to approve the apps their teens download.”
The direction of the legal challenge over the Texas law, which would otherwise take effect in January, could have important lessons for a similar federal law. But Lee doesn’t see any need to wait to see how it performs. He says, “I have full confidence in moving forward on this as is. I do not believe there is anything illegal, unconstitutional or otherwise problematic in this legislation.” “There is certainly no reason to delay.”
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