Social media platforms are not fond of age assurance measures as a rule, but Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, is willing to change its tune – if the responsibility falls on someone else.
A proposed law could place it on app stores, which has Meta nodding in agreement. Two Republican senators, Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John James (R-MI), are cooking up a bill that would put the onus for age verification on app store operators and potentially allow parents to sue companies if weak or nonexistent age assurance protections allow their kids to access age-inappropriate material.
The Washington Post reports that the bill is gaining steam.
Parents want to decide if their children can access social media: Meta
Meta’s campaign to foist age checks on anyone other than its own platforms – and, specifically, onto Google and Apple – is not limited to the States. A post on Medium from the Meta Australia Policy Blog says that as the Australian government ramps up its age assurance legislation, the company thinks there are “important factors missing from the conversation.”
Australia’s age assurance law, says Meta, fails to account for “parents’ desire to be involved in teens’ online lives” and “the unintended consequences social media age limits may have” if implementation is not “given further thought.”
Parents, they say, want to be the ones to oversee their children’s online activity. A survey the firm conducted showed support for “a law requiring parental approval for children under age 16 to download apps.”
“By a two to one margin (67 percent), Australian parents surveyed say that parents should be able to choose if their teen under the age of 16 is able to use social media apps over outright bans of social media for minors under 16 (33 percent).”
The roughly one thousand Australian parents surveyed also rather conveniently said they believe “app stores are easier and more secure places than apps for giving parental approval,” offering a centralized approach to age assurance instead of approvals for each individual app. More verifications, says Meta, means more points at which personal data is potentially exposed.
And, of course, “the cost of compliance cannot be understated; small and emerging apps and platforms may not be able to comply at all.”
Meta misses mark comparing online age assurance to theme park rides
“There’s a solution that negates many of these concerns and simplifies things immeasurably for parents: parental consent and age verification should happen on the app store,” the company says.
It then goes on to defeat its own argument with a botched theme park metaphor. “Think about it,” says the post. “Theme parks check IDs before you enter, they don’t check every time you want to get on a ride. Similarly, app stores should be the ones verifying age, not the apps they sell.”
Anyone who has visited a theme park with a child will be familiar with the large rulers, cartoon characters or other measures at the entry to every roller coaster, confirming how tall one must be to ride – effectively, a crude form of biometric age estimation.
Much of the post is dedicated to friendly, mildly authoritarian assurances that, “in supporting an app store/OS-level solution, Meta is not attempting to divest itself of responsibility to ensure a safe and age appropriate experience for teens across its platforms.”
And there is clear appeal in its insistence that, “with this solution, parents can verify their teen’s age when setting up their phone and app stores can then apply that age to any apps young people want to download or request parental consent to download.”
Responsibility for age assurance should be as ‘close’ to risk as possible
The problem, say age verification experts and providers, is that while that sounds more convenient, it also increases exposure to risk.
The UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) is currently running age assurance trials for the Australian government. In a comment posted to LinkedIn, its executive director Tony Allen says that when addressing risks like children’s access to pornographic content, “the effectiveness of risk mitigation depends largely on how close the control is applied to the source of the risk.”
In other words, app stores are “further away” from the points at which young users might see restricted content. And the further away the control is from the risk, the less precise and effective it becomes. “Using age assurance technologies at the point of encounter – or immediately prior – ensures that the mitigation is directly linked to the risk.”
“Managing risks that you create,” Allen says, “is not something that you can devolve.”
AVPA asks, what if the kids get ahold of Uncle Ted’s phone?
The Age Verification Provider’s Association has its own list of reasons why making app stores responsible for age assurance is not ideal. App age ratings aren’t very well regulated, and in-app purchases and ads with inappropriate content could seep through the cracks. Dynamic content updates mean apps are constantly changing, which could render prior age checks inapplicable. And devices get passed around and shared among people of different ages.
“An older user may be logged into the device and app store and download apps which are then accessed by a younger user who gets access to that device with or without the knowledge or consent of the original user,” says AVPA’s blog. “There is no opportunity for regular authentication to check that the current user is the same user who has proven their age to the app store.”
Another believer that age verification really isn’t the app store’s job? Apple, naturally. The tech giant is reported to be gearing up to mount its own legal pushback against proposals to put age assurance on its shoulders. In opposing a recent Louisiana child safety bill, the company purportedly “inundated” Louisiana Rep. Kim Carver (R) with messages objecting to his proposed age verification provision, and eventually crushed it at a key committee stage.
Article Topics
Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) | age verification | Apple | AVPA | biometrics | children | digital identity | Google | Meta | mobile app | social media
