The False Promise of App Store Age Verification |
The App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), now under consideration in Congress, is unconstitutional. It would require every user of a mobile device to verify his age, preconditioning access to the everyday digital services of modern life on the provision of a government-issued identification or biometrics. These data are given over to platforms and verification services whose databases, through malice or ordinary human error, have often proven far from secure. Before allowing an underage user to download an application, app stores would have to secure parental consent. A Bible app or Khan Academy would fall subject to the ASAA’s show-your-papers regime as much as Instagram or Snapchat. This the First Amendment cannot tolerate. The policy “is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door,” a federal judge wrote in December, as he enjoined the State of Texas’s version of the ASAA.
The ASAA’s appeal is, nonetheless, intense: it is advanced as a means “to empower parents and protect children,” which, amid the uncertainty of a technologically unfamiliar world, seems to most to be worth ends. To avoid begging the question, however, it must be determined whether the ASAA is likely to achieve its aims. It is not, a fact which forces a reconsideration of the tradeoffs inherent in its policies. Any compromise with respect to the First Amendment and free speech, however objectionable, might seem palatable to many American voters if children were to benefit from substantial new protections. But the bill promises to enact no such........