John Read spent three decades at the U.S. Department of Justice, including time investigating tech companies. He’s seen a lot of children and teenagers suffering and addicted to their devices.
Takeaways
- Supporters of the bill say this protects children and requires major corporations to be more responsible for the products they put out.
- Opponents say this is unconstitutional and doesn’t address the problem at hand.
- The bill had bipartisan support when it passed the Senate.
He remembers a recent story where an AI chatbot convinced a child to hurt himself and told the boy that his parents were the problem. The child ended up in a mental institution and the family sued.
The child agreed to the app’s terms of service, which limit damages to $100 and require mediation before lawsuits.
Read, with the Digital Childhood Alliance, shared this story with Kansas lawmakers to push for a law that would require age verification before anyone downloads an app from an app store.
The bill requires:
- App stores to verify someone’s age using commercially available methods.
- Parents would need to consent to any app that children under 18 download.
- Apps wouldn’t be able to enforce terms of service against children, like in the case Read mentioned.
- The Kansas attorney general would also need to create age-verification rules by 2027 that the apps should follow.
Read and other supporters of the bill say this legislation will protect children in an increasingly digital world. Lawsuits are popping up as AI chatbot apps show children sexually explicit images and parents struggle to keep up with the constant bombardment of apps to verify.
Rep. Laura Williams, a Johnson County Republican, is a mother. She is always trying to make sure her children are using age-appropriate apps, but the app store doesn’t always provide appropriate age ranges for its products. She said her children downloaded an app that had sexually suggestive situations, yet was rated for children.
“Kids are being exposed to tobacco, alcohol (and) sexual content at the age of 7 years old,” she said. “I have a problem with that.”
The Kansas bill mirrors legislation in Texas and Alabama. Similar bills are being struck down in court, though.
A federal judge shot down the Texas bill, saying parts of it were unconstitutionally vague and overly broad.
“The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book,” the judge wrote.
Kansas lawmakers say they know about the Texas court challenge, and they wrote their bill differently so it can survive legal fights. Kansas lawmakers who support the bill say this law is about contracts. Since businesses can’t enforce contract provisions on minors, they say, that should also apply to apps.
Opponents of the bill say that speech and constitutionality are still issues. They argue the bill is too similar to Texas’ proposal.
Justin Hill, with NetChoice, a trade association for the tech industry, said there are already parental protections on app stores. Parents can set screen time limits, create family accounts and set up other protections.
Hill, who has four teenage boys, said he wants to protect children, but this bill needs to be reworked. In addition to constitutional concerns, the bill also puts children’s private data at risk, opponents argue.
Read, who spoke in favor of the bill, said app stores like Google and Apple already know our ages. There are credit cards on file, birthdays tied to accounts and algorithms that can tell how old we are based on how we text and our interests. So it should be easy to know who needs restrictions and who doesn’t.
Hill said it isn’t that simple. The bill doesn’t prevent these companies from asking for our driver’s license information or other personal data, so these companies might ask for it and keep it in databases that could be hacked.
The bill already passed the Senate 34-6 with bipartisan support. The six votes against it included four Republicans and two Democrats. The legislation just wrapped up a two-day hearing in a House committee.
Williams said parents are falling behind through no fault of their own.
“Over and over we hear how parents are too lazy to be able to monitor these parental controls,” she said. “I take offense to that. … It seems that these apps and app developers are still not rating their apps accordingly. And so as a parent, I don’t have all the information in front of me.”
