Yesterday, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce advanced the App Store Accountability Act, which will now be considered by the full House. The bill would require the operators of the largest app stores—specifically, Apple and Google Play—to verify user ages via “commercially reasonable methods,” and shut their doors to minors lacking parental consent. The bill’s sponsors say that “age verification is necessary to protect kids and empower American families.” They are wrong. The act’s provisions amount to little more than a change to the default settings for minors downloading apps, providing parents with false comfort while imposing real risks on all Americans.
Under the status quo, parents are effectively the gatekeepers of their children’s use of these app stores. Parents can monitor a child’s downloads and online behavior, restrict access to certain apps, and set guidelines around screen time. Parents have at their disposal tools from the app stores themselves, along with a host of third-party apps and services.
Threats to children online come from a dizzying number of directions, and many parents cannot fully grasp the social complexities of being a kid in the digital age. The potential for fights, peer pressure, and kids making bad decisions behind their parents’ backs can feel almost limitless. Digital tools can help a great deal when applied well, as can more time-honored tactics like grounding and confiscating phones. Applying these imperfect tools can be painful, awkward, and leave parents agonizing over what they can or should do differently, which can make legislation such as this bill seem like a logical next step
However, beneath the veneer of a false sense of safety, the App Store Accountability Act amounts to little more than a change in the default settings of digital parenting. App stores must verify users’ ages and exclude children without parental consent. This shift would change parental controls from “opt-out,” where parents actively choose where to limit access, to “opt-in,” where parents must take time to allow access to all the content they want their children to view.
As any parent knows, this change in default settings will not make conflicts at home any easier. Children will face the same peer pressure at school and retain the same ability to stay ahead of their parents with ill-gotten tools of their own. Some parents may find the idea of a government-imposed age gate appealing. Perhaps age verification and parental consent will change social norms and their kids’ expectations. Withholding a “yes” might be easier for some parents than saying “no,” though this is hardly a healthy role for government to play. The idea that kids with absentee or less-involved parents will be more “protected” may also have surface appeal, though such problems sadly cut both ways. Instead of being unsupervised online, kids with less-involved parents could wind up more cut off from the digital world than their peers.
The App Store Accountability Act would create a false sense of safety and ease while generating real privacy, security, and First Amendment concerns for all Americans. The age verification requirements at the heart of the bill are functionally equivalent to requiring all app store users to provide either a government ID or biometric data, such as facial scans. The bill’s sponsors attempt to sweep this uncomfortable truth under the rug by calling it “commercially reasonable” methods. They frequently cite the example of Apple Pay as a secure and unintrusive form of age verification. Apple Pay requires a credit or debit card. Credit and debit cards, of course, require their holders to provide items such as IDs and Social Security numbers to banks in order to obtain them. At the end of the chain, virtually any commercially reasonable method to verify age results in an ID check.
From a privacy perspective, age verification online has, historically, turned out poorly for companies that have tried to implement it. In the United Kingdom, where a similar law was passed, one of the third-party vendors for Discord, an online chat and streaming platform, suffered a breach, exposing the identification information of over 70,000 users. The Tea App, a dating app for women, required users to verify their gender through a photo or ID. The company left those identification documents exposed on the open web. Even age verification companies that tout the industry’s best data privacy protections have been subject to breaches, exposing the identification information of thousands more.
If the act’s proponents succeed in exchanging Americans’ privacy for a superficial sense of safety, they’ll next face extensive First Amendment battles in court. In December, a federal judge blocked Texas Senate Bill 2420—a model for the federal act—from taking effect. “The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robert Pitmann.
As a society, we prioritize the safety of children above almost anything else. We are at times forced to make difficult trade-offs regarding privacy and constitutionality to protect children. But the App Store Accountability Act does not force such a moral dilemma, because its protections for children are illusory. Underneath vague language like “actual knowledge” and “commercial reasonableness” sits the truth that the bill’s protections for kids amount to little more than cosmetic changes to default settings.
In truth, talking about “solutions” to kids’ online safety is misleading. However, more promising approaches than the App Store Accountability Act do exist. Proposals that involve parents voluntarily sending an age signal to app stores, which the app stores must transmit to developers, are wrongly rejected by many because they do not feel they offer perfect protection for kids. But to truly do better by kids online as a society requires that we admit the hard truth that no easy solutions exist. Parents, not laws, are the most important tool to keep kids safe online.