Age assurance laws at US state level keep coming

Conservative states continue to push for age assurance requirements on content deemed harmful to kids, with South Dakota signing its age assurance bill into law and Alabama hearing a similar bill this week.

South Dakota becomes 20th state to enact age assurance law

A report in Keloland quotes Republican Rep. Bethany Soye, who calls South Dakota’s HB1053 “the strongest age verification law in the nation.” The law requires platforms to implement “reasonable age verification methods,” which it says can include a state-issued driver’s license or identity card, bank account verification, “a debit or credit card from the individual that requires the individual in ownership of the card to be at least eighteen years of age” or “any other method or document that reliably and accurately indicates if a user of a covered platform is a minor and prevents a minor from accessing the content of a covered platform.”

Presumably, this includes third-party age assurance providers, although it is not clear if age estimation technology fulfils the state’s criteria.

The strength of which Soye speaks applies to both the law’s applicability and its enforcement.

Unlike states that have adopted a 33.3 percent threshold of potentially harmful content to determine which sites require age assurance, South Dakota’s law applies to any site “for which it is in the regular course of the website’s trade or business to create, host, or make available material that is harmful to minors.”

And it includes both civil and criminal liability for violations – although “the civil penalty may be assessed and recovered only in a civil action brought by the attorney general,” and should not be “construed to serve as the basis for a new private right of action.”

Alabama targets app stores for age assurance with Meta’s blessing

In Alabama, lawmakers are looking to impose age assurance requirements at the app store level – and winning support from Meta, which has vocally campaigned to make age assurance someone else’s problem. The state’s HB317 would “require accounts of minors to be affiliated with their parents’ accounts, so minors would have to obtain parental consent to download an app,” and “prevent app store providers and developers from enforcing contracts against minors, misrepresenting information in disclosures and sharing personal age verification data.”

A piece in ABC WAAY 31 quotes Meta’s Head of Safety Policy for North America Jennifer Hanley, who says “what we really want is a solution that’s easier for parents, something that’s really simple and privacy protected.” She lauds HB317’s requirement for minor accounts to be affiliated with parent accounts and says “it’s putting parents really in charge of what teens are downloading, what social media sites they’re using like ours.”

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Chris Sells, R-Greenville, argues that since apps are the delivery mechanism for mobile content, they are the best level at which to impose regulation.

Tighter regulations on porn translate to big wins for Yoti

While the adult industry, social media firms and digital rights groups each take umbrage with age assurance laws, they are proving to be a boon for age assurance providers. In a recent blog, Yoti CEO Robin Tombs writes that, “in the U.S., many states have been introducing age verification laws for porn sites over the last 18 months. This has driven more than 400 percent of our growth over the last year and 132 percent of our growth over the last month when age verification laws in Florida and South Carolina came into effect.”

Tombs says that stiff penalties for noncompliance in the U.S. are pushing more and more porn sites to look to Yoti’s solutions, which include facial age estimation, email age estimation and the Yoti digital wallet, which can “receive ‘over 18’ attributes.”

The CEO also makes the case for age estimation as highly effective age assurance, and pointedly notes that “whilst Ofcom has not yet published the false positive rate that would meet its ‘highly effective’ requirement for online porn and other age-restricted content, it’d be very challenging for a regulator to reprimand or fine a business if it’s using Yoti facial age estimation with an age threshold of 20 or 21 years,” for which false positive rates are, respectively, 1.42 percent and 0.77 percent for an evenly distributed group of 13-17 year olds.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Alabama  |  app stores  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  face biometrics  |  legislation  |  Meta  |  South Dakota  |  Yoti