Requiring children to submit personal data to meet age verification mandates is likely to endanger their privacy and security.

Some bad ideas can, with some reflection and revision, be turned into good ideas. Others are unsalvageable. Of this last category are online age verification mandates, an ill-conceived proposal that has — notwithstanding its many defects — gained purchase in the minds of state legislators nationwide.
To date, several states have imposed such mandates on social media platforms, of which many have fallen in court. Age verification carries significant privacy and cybersecurity dangers, often requiring users to upload a picture of government-issued identification documents or to submit to a facial scan. Conditioning Americans’ (including adult Americans’) access to online speech on the offering up of sensitive personal information cannot withstand First Amendment scrutiny — as numerous courts, including the Supreme Court, have ruled.
Perhaps seeing these faults, age verification advocates have pivoted from platform-level age verification to app-store-level age verification. The year is young still, but state legislators have rushed to file app store bills in several states, including Alaska, South Carolina and Utah. Utah’s bill — SB142 — would require app stores to verify each user’s age and would allow underage users to download apps only after obtaining “verifiable parental consent.” However, like all bills of its type, SB142’s purported benefits are illusory, and its differentiation from failed platform-level models is scant. If app-store mandates can be considered a road different from platform mandates, both nonetheless arrive at the same unconstitutional destination.
To determine a user’s age, an online service must collect some sort of data. According to the French national data-protection agency, no age-verification software exists “that satisfactorily meets (the) three requirements” of “sufficiently reliable verification, complete coverage of the population and respect for the protection of individual’s data and privacy and their security.” The Australian government reached a similar conclusion: “Each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness or implementation issues.” These manifest defects in the technology — when foisted on users by the government —put heavy burdens on Americans’ speech rights.
Requiring verification of app stores instead of platforms fails to erase these risks. Sensitive personal data must still be harvested from users, making that data vulnerable. Even government agencies and the largest corporations fall victim regularly to hackers, as do third-party identity-verification services. The additional risks that attend online age verification distinguish it from offline age checks, such an ID check at a bar or tobacco shop. The weight of these additional impositions on the constitutional rights of adult Americans doom online age verification mandates to death-by-injunction.
Age verification mandates are among a suite of children’s safety policies that concerned activists and politicians have advanced in recent years, usually with sterling motives. Besides examining intentions, however, one must also ask whether their proposed solutions will, in practice, protect children. It seems they will not. First off, requiring children to submit personal data to tech companies seems likelier to endanger their privacy and security. Children can, moreover, dodge app-store age verification by using devices on which app stores do not act as gatekeepers, such as desktops, laptops, gaming consoles and other internet-enabled devices.
It bears emphasis that, as noted by the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, attempts to simply ban children from certain types of media trespass on parental rights and responsibilities. “While some of the legislation’s effect may indeed be in support of what some parents of the restricted children actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want,” Justice Scalia wrote.
Usually, age verification bills propose to block children under the designated age threshold from accessing social media. Parents everywhere should consider whether they wish the government to make such decisions.
Intending to write an effective and constitutional bill does not, unfortunately, guarantee that the final product will be anything of the kind. Promoting an ineffectual policy at the cost of the speech rights of every adult American social media user fails by every metric of good governance. The digital world operates by the same laws — both constitutionally and economically — as the “real” world. Lawmakers — in Utah and nationwide — must work within the constraints of the available technology and the Constitution to craft policy that will work in practice, not just in theory.
Source: Utah News