California App Store Age Verification Bill Awaits Signature

App stores could soon be required to slurp up your personal information if you live in California thanks to age verification.

Once upon a time, age verification was allegedly about applying age checks to porn sites. Of course, people like us knew better and knew this was about applying a new level of government surveillance and censorship onto the internet, but the requirements for adult content being present in early versions of such laws to have a certain percentage of adult content on their site before the law applies at least offered a convincing argument for some that the government wouldn’t expand on this thought control power grab.

Of course, those days are long gone and only a complete idiot would believe age verification laws have anything to do with adult content. After all, we’ve gone well past adult websites and have seen age verification get used to censor political speech, addiction prevention discussions, social media platforms entirely, YouTube, search engines, and AI Chat bots. What’s more, there is talk about expanding this even further to also include VPNs and even requirements to remove content completely to prevent people from accessing such content regardless of age. The question is not whether or not government was going to abuse its power to venture further and further into cracking down on speech (that ship has sailed a long time ago), but rather, at what point does the government go so far that there is sufficient push back to stop expanding on this censorship creep.

One area government has been looking at expanding mass government censorship and surveillance is app stores. Last November, Republicans were pushing to add age verification to such storefronts. One peculiar aspect to all of this is the fact that tech giants like Google and Meta have been backing this. On the surface, this is a bizarre move because why would you actively lobby to make your product worse? The simple reality is that these large platforms are hoping to offload age verification responsibilities to the app stores. If the age verification inevitably gets circumvented on mobile, it’s not the platforms fault, go blame the app store. It’s basically a way to, at least in part, cheap out on having to comply with age verification laws.

The huge problem here is that this gives government to track what you do and censor speech at the hardware level as far as mobile devices are concerned. This is particularly problematic for the notoriously closed source Apple ecosystem, but also present something of a problem for Android users as well. In order to evade the censors, one could sideload the app in question, but that inherently brings about security issues since it’s more than possible to get an app from a dubious website that adds on a few extra features that the user doesn’t want. Either way, this does add an unprecedented level of control the government can exert on users.

Such efforts are moving ahead at the state level. In California, a bill that has made its way through the legislative process is now sitting at the governors desk, waiting for the signature of governor Gavin Newsom. From Politico:

A California bill to check kids’ ages online is heading to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, after it secured rare support from major tech giants, including Google, Meta and Snap.

The proposal, which would require device makers and app stores to verify user ages, cleared the state Assembly 58-0 in the early hours of Saturday with backing from Republicans and Democrats.

Google and Meta, plus other tech firms like OpenAI and Pinterest, rallied around the online age verification plan this week despite recently sparring over similar measures in Utah and Texas. They argue the measure from Democratic state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks offers a more reasonable solution and hope it becomes a de facto national standard for other states weighing mandatory age-checks amid bipartisan concerns about kids’ safety online.

“This is a critical piece of infrastructure for how to create more thoughtful safeguards for kids online,” Wicks told POLITICO.

Google, Meta and the like argue Wicks’ AB 1043 is a more balanced and privacy-protective approach because it allows kids to download apps without parental consent, unlike the laws passed in Utah and Texas.

It also doesn’t mandate photo ID uploads — a controversial feature that sparked outrage from privacy advocates when the United Kingdom implemented age-gating rules earlier this summer. Instead, Wicks’ bill asks parents to input their kids’ ages when setting up a smartphone, tablet or laptop; groups users into one of four age brackets; and sends their age info to apps like Facebook and Instagram.

This does shed some light on a particularly dubious part of these debates. That is the debate over which age verification legal style is better than another. I’ve seen this with Bluesky where they would comply with some laws, but not others, arguing that certain versions of age verification are more flexible than others. The problem with these arguments is the fact that this is part of the reason why government feels they have the green light to enact these ridiculous laws in the first place. It implies that age verification laws are OK, depending on how they are handled.

Specifically, some laws allow platforms to simply choose the method they feel works best for them instead of mandating specific solutions. Some platforms want to just offshore the responsibility to a third party vendor, pay whatever fees, then dust their hands of this whole thing. This even as it has been found that some of these third party vendors are happily helping themselves to vast troves of user personal information. For the platforms, that is not their problem.

I’ve repeatedly stated that major services are throwing users under the bus. This is not just because I’m opposed to the concept of age verification outright, but also because users personal information are at risk of being collected and sold off to shady third parties among other things. Age verification vendors have repeatedly held onto users personal information more than what would be considered necessary to verify peoples ages. This over top of the leaks, breaches, and hacks that have plagued these systems thanks to horrible security practices, yet those stories repeatedly get swept under the rug by other media outlets as if to pretend this sort of thing doesn’t happen. Either way, their users are getting completely screwed in all of this for a whole variety of reasons.

Regardless, I can only see this situation getting worse moving forward. Governments from around the world are seizing on a moral panic and using it to exert unprecedented control over the internet and legally protected speech. It will only continue until people start standing up and saying, “hey, we’ve had enough”. Until that happens, things are only going to get worse.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.