Creating a digital age-gate

Even after a decades-long war on childhood, there are still a great many things in this country you cannot do if you’re under 18: You can’t take out a loan or enter any binding contract, you can’t buy risky products like alcohol or tobacco, and you can’t access sexually explicit venues, like strip clubs. You can’t even open a bank account without a parent present, and of course you can’t drive a car until you’re 15 or 16. But go online—which is increasingly where most kids spend their time—and all that goes right out the window. You can sign away all of your privacy rights to the world’s most powerful corporations, be whisked into the presence of digital sex workers—or worse yet, sex predators—open digital bank accounts like the Cash app, and access an endless array of dangerous and addictive apps.

This bizarre state of affairs, which has been wreaking havoc on the mental health of our youth, is at last being challenged by a growing movement. One of the newest groups to join the fray, the Digital Childhood Alliance, has focused its crusade on the two biggest gatekeepers of the digital world: the Apple and Android app stores. It is through these two portals that the vast majority of America’s teens (and indeed most pre-teens) gain their primary access to the digital world, with all its promise and perils. And perils there are aplenty. Studies suggest that 1 in 6 children in the United States, and 1 in 8 globally, experience some kind of online sexual harassment or exploitation—and that, of course, is if you don’t count exposure to graphic pornography as exploitation!

Most of this happens on mainstream apps like Instagram, Tiktok, and Snapchat, or even games like Roblox. Far more than most parents realize, even seemingly innocuous apps often have social-media-type functions that often offer an open gateway for children to be targeted with sexually explicit messages, or have built-in web browser functionality that can bypass parental controls. Often, sidebars or pop-up ads lure children to download adult apps or access adult websites. And while both Google and Android app stores feature age ratings, these ratings are effectively meaningless and are not even enforced—since neither platform makes any effort to check user age.

Last week, Utah became the first state to pass the App Store Accountability Act, which aims to finally close this massive legal loophole destroying America’s children. According to the law, which is being considered in at least eight other states and the U.S. Congress, developers can be sued for misleading age ratings, and Apple and Google will be required to verify whether app store users are 18 or older; if they are not, explicit parental consent will be necessary for every single app download and every in-app purchase. The law constitutes a remarkable redistribution of power away from two of the largest companies on the planet and back to the bedrock unit of every society: the family.

For years, Apple and Google have denied that such age-verification is technically possible … right up until a couple weeks ago, that is, when Apple suddenly announced an upcoming major overhaul of its app store. The overhaul includes a “Declared Age Range API” that will enable an iPhone to tell an app whether a user is too young to use the app, without giving away the user’s actual birthdate. The announcement is not all that impressive as a child-safety initiative in its own right—it leaves plenty of loopholes still in place, and, as critics point out, “still treat[s] teens as digital adults, allowing minors to agree to complex terms of service contracts without parental consent.” Clearly, Apple is trying to convince legislators to leave it alone, much as Meta did last year in introducing “Instagram for Teens.” But, as an admission that parents were right all along—that the app store was unsafe and exploitative, and that Apple had the technology to fix it—the announcement is an earthquake that could shake the tech industry to its core.

With new legislative initiatives on age verification popping up in state after state, and the Supreme Court likely to rule in favor of the constitutionality of such laws later this spring, companies like Apple and Meta are likely to be playing defense for quite some time to come. It is essential for parents to keep up the pressure; technologically, there is now no reason why we can’t age-gate the internet at least as effectively as we do the brick-and-mortar world. And given the well-documented perils of the online world, we owe it to our children to demand nothing less.