| As a push by lawmakers to require online platforms to check users’ ages gains momentum, tech companies are fighting over whose responsibility that should be. At issue is how to most effectively keep children away from adult content and safe from online harms without sacrificing internet users’ privacy and anonymity — or violating the First Amendment. Last week, Utah’s legislature passed a bill backed by social media companies Meta, Snap and X that would make app stores — that is, Apple and Google — responsible for differentiating between kids and adults online. Children would need parental consent to download apps. That stands in contrast to previous age-verification laws in Utah and elsewhere that put the onus on adult-oriented apps and websites, in some cases including social media platforms, to keep minors out. Those laws have been held up by court challenges over their constitutionality, including from the tech trade group NetChoice. In a win for Meta, Utah’s bill will soon become law — and others like it are in the works. The state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, plans to sign the bill “in the coming weeks,” a spokesperson for his office told the Tech Brief on Wednesday. “Children should never be entering into contracts with tech companies without a parent’s knowledge or consent — period,” Cox said in a statement. Similar bills have been introduced in several other states, including South Carolina and South Dakota. Meta has argued that the app-store approach is both more convenient than requiring users to verify their ages directly with apps and websites and, potentially, less problematic constitutionally. (It has yet to be tested in court.) At the national level, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) plans to reintroduce legislation “later this month” that would require app stores to verify ages, his communications director Billy Gribbin said. Lee previously introduced the App Store Accountability Act in November, as the Tech Brief reported at the time. Now Google is pushing back with what it calls “a better way.” On Wednesday, the search giant criticized Utah’s bill and others like it, saying they’re “being pushed by Meta and other companies in an effort to offload their own responsibilities to keep kids safe.” Such proposals “introduce new risks to the privacy of minors,” Google public policy director Kareem Ghanem wrote, by requiring app stores to share information about their age with potentially millions of individual companies. “A weather app doesn’t need to know if a user is a kid,” Ghanem wrote. Under Google’s proposal, app stores would verify users’ ages, but would then provide “age assurances” only to the developers of apps that “may be risky for minors” and only with permission. It would be on those apps to request the information — and to use it to keep kids safe. Last month, Apple published its own white paper on keeping kids safe online. It also rolled out child safety features that include the ability for parents to select their child’s age range when they set up the device — information that they can then choose to share with apps that want to restrict access to certain content. Meta said Google’s proposal shouldn’t deter lawmakers from moving forward. “We welcome Google’s concession that they can share age information with app developers, and we agree this should be done in a privacy-preserving manner,” Meta spokesperson Rachel Holland said in an emailed statement. But she said it’s “unclear how they’ll determine which apps are eligible to receive this data,” adding that “the simplest way to protect teens online is to put parents in charge.” Some childrens’ safety advocates said they’re still evaluating the various ideas. The parental control bills that Meta supports, including in Utah, are not a “silver bullet,” said James P. Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, in a statement. Kids may find ways around the requirement or pressure parents into approving apps they don’t understand, he said. And social media companies need to clean up their acts regardless. Google’s approach sounds promising, said Kris Perry, executive director of the nonprofit Childrens and Screens. But she said that when it comes to parental controls online, more research is needed to determine what actually works and whether it can be done in a way that protects kids’ privacy. There also remains opposition to the idea of requiring age verification in any form. Among the organizations opposing such regulation is the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. It wrote in a recent post about the proposals: “Age verification laws do far more than ‘protect children online’—they require the creation of a system that collects vast amounts of personal information from everyone. Instead of making the internet safer for children, these laws force all users — regardless of age — to verify their identity just to access basic content or products.” One study, published as a working paper earlier this month by a group of university researchers, found that existing age-verification policies aimed at keeping minors away from pornography don’t work. Instead, they push more people to use VPNs that disguise their browsing and to visit porn sites that don’t comply with the laws. | 
