I have three things to say about this.
A Texas student group and two high schoolers are suing to block a new state law that would require everyone — adults and minors alike — to verify their age before downloading or making in-app purchases.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court by Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and two minors, argues the App Store Accountability Act violates the First Amendment by restricting access to protected speech.
“The Act imposes content-based prior restraints on speech that replace parents’ freedom to moderate their children’s access to sources for learning, communication, and creativity,” the lawsuit reads. A similar lawsuit against the law was filed earlier in the day by the Computer & Communications Industry Association.
Passed with near-unanimous support during this year’s legislative session, the law would require adults to verify their age before downloading any app. Minors couldn’t download apps or make in-app purchases without parental approval, and parents would have to prove their identity and give consent each time. The law is set to take effect in January 2026.
Attorneys argue the law would have far-reaching effects, extending beyond social media to educational, news and creative apps like Wikipedia, Duolingo, Audible, Spotify, ESPN, The New York Times — even games like Minecraft. The student plaintiffs, including a high school journalist and a debater, argue it would directly limit their ability to learn, communicate and express themselves.
The lawsuit also points to parental concerns. According to the lawsuit, Vanessa Fernandez, a mother of one plaintiff, believes her son “deserves and benefits from having a certain amount of privacy and autonomy, including over his digital activities. The Act would require her to intrude on [his] privacy and autonomy to a degree she would not otherwise, effectively overriding her parental decision-making.”
1. Parental controls already exist for Android and Apple users. We used the latter for our girls, which required me to approve any apps they wanted to download. The girls found that annoying, and occasionally caused a minor issue because of the need to get an app in a timely fashion for school reasons, but we all lived through it. As such, this law doesn’t solve any problems. It just imposes government control on a parental function, which is more than a little ironic given the constitutional amendment to enshrine “parental rights” on the ballot this year.
2. Age verification is the reason that Pornhub is no longer available in Texas. It’s also been blessed by the corrupt Supreme Court, which I think will make this a tough case for the SEAT folks. It may seem reasonable enough to say “well, sure, we don’t want kids looking at porn”, but once that’s been legalized, who knows where it goes next.
3. The one thing that never seems to get discussed, or at least discussed and taken seriously enough, is the giant security risk that age verification laws introduce. Age verification is often accomplished by uploading an image of one’s drivers license to whatever service is being used, and I hope I don’t have to explain to you how risky that is. But if you need to understand that a bit more, know that 70,000 people in the UK had their government IDs exposed to hackers in the recent Discord breach. I personally would have rather let my kids download Minecraft than let their identities get stolen, but maybe that’s just me.