This week, CDT joined the Internet Society (ISOC) and New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) to file an amicus brief supporting Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and the Computer & Communication Industry Association (CCIA) in their challenge to Texas’s App Store Accountability Act. The law requires app stores to verify the ages of all of their users and, for minor users, requires parents to approve every app download and re-approve use of apps every time a “significant change” is made — a term broadly defined. App stores must also share age-related data with every app to implement the laws requirements. The district court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the law from going into effect and observing the law was “akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door.” The Fifth Circuit stayed the injunction pending appeal finding that the law should be subject to a lesser standard of scrutiny that it would be more likely to survive. Now the Fifth Circuit is considering the case in more detail.
Our brief argues that the App Store Accountability Act should not survive either standard of scrutiny applied by the courts. It cites to CDT research showing that parents and their children are exceedingly skeptical of age verification requirements and concerned about the ways they invade privacy. It further argues that parents and children find requirements that parents’ granularly control kids’ online lives to be invasive and overly burdensome. Both of these points underscore the chilling effect the App Store Accountability Act will have on accessing critical speech and other online services for kids and adults alike.
Finally, the brief argues that Texas could have taken a more privacy-protective and less speech-restrictive approach to helping children and their families achieve more appropriate experiences online. For example, Texas could have required the implementation of a voluntary age signaling system, giving parents, teens, and children the ability to choose which apps receive their age data to facilitate appropriate experiences.
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