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On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to block Texas’s App Store Accountability Act, letting the state require age verification and parental consent before minors can download apps while litigation continues in lower courts. For now, app store owners and app developers serving Texans will need age-assurance infrastructure in place.
This ruling matters beyond Texas. More than a dozen states have introduced similar app-store-level verification laws, and unlike site-level age gates, they push the compliance burden upstream to Apple and Google—meaning it radiates out to every app in their stores, privacy-conscious or not. It’s the same paradox we flagged with the KIDS Act last week: meaningful age assurance requires collecting more data, not less. The difference now is that states, not just Congress, are building that infrastructure—and doing it state by state, with no two laws defining “verification” the same way.
Privacy advocates may cry foul at any overarching age verification legislation, but the patchwork approach is almost certainly worse. Without a standard approach, it’s almost certain that businesses will over-collect data for verification. That means any breaches will be more impactful, exposing children’s data that didn’t need to be collected in the first place.
If that’s something you’d like to keep on your radar, our Privacy Enforcement Tracker is a good place to watch for the latest data breaches, among other privacy developments.
Best,
Arlo
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