Age Verification and the App Store
Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley:
Driven by the alleged risks of social media to teen mental health—as well as examples of social-media apps being used to sell drugs to minors and recruit child sex-abuse victims—a wave of states have proposed or passed legislation to regulate platforms. The proposals restrict their ability to collect data on minors, serve them algorithmically targeted content or allow them to establish accounts without parental approval.
Before Carver’s bill in Louisiana, Apple had largely managed to stay out of the fray, but that is expected to change as lawmakers nationwide seek to confront the issue. Social-media platforms and many youth-safety advocates argue that effective content restrictions will require some form of age verification from Apple and Google, the duopoly that oversees operating-system software for the world’s billions of smartphones.
“Age verifying app by app is a case of whack-a-mole,” said Chris McKenna, founder of advocacy group Protect Young Eyes, who also advises Apple on digital-safety issues for children. “Every device knows the age of its user. We give our devices an enormous amount of our identity.”
An Apple spokesman said that websites and social-media companies are best positioned to verify a user’s age and that user privacy expectations would be violated if the company was required to share the age of its users with third-party apps.
I get that Apple doesn’t want to be responsible for age verification, but it’s really a stretch to say that this is better for privacy. With payment processing, Apple is all about protecting customers by only giving the App Store their billing information. It’s too dangerous to give a random Web site your credit card number, we’re told. But when we’re talking about much more sensitive information, like proof of identity, we’re supposed to believe the opposite. You should upload your driver’s license to each individual service because Apple collecting the information once and then sharing a Boolean would violate your privacy.
Despite Apple’s opposition, however, the bill actually passed on the house floor. It was unanimous.
However, before the legislation could be voted on by the Senate, a key committee had to put it up for a vote. That committee is where Apple prevailed. Though no one on the committee would comment to the WSJ, it ultimately had its mention of app stores as responsible parties removed.
According to Carver, Apple lobbyists inundated him with messages “all day, every day.”
[…]
Louisiana was the first state to pass a law requiring age verification with IDs for sites that host adult content. Other states followed suit in approving similar statutes.
In May, The Post was the first to report that Google and Meta spent nearly $1 million on lobbyists who were hired to fight proposed legislation in New York that was aimed at protecting children online.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-17): It seems that Apple already has an API for age verification, but it only works with certain US states and only apps in certain categories can request the entitlement.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
fwiw Apple already has a private way of checking people’s age through the apple pay IDs/wallet APIs: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/passkit_apple_pay_and_wallet/pkidentityelement/3930277-age
