One-size-fits-all approach to age assurance won’t adequately protect kids: Google

Meta and Apple have stated their positions on age assurance, so it was a matter of time before Google did the same. A statement from Google’s Director of Public Policy Kareem Ghanem lays out the company’s legislative proposal for keeping kids safe online – and calls out Meta for its campaign to push the responsibility for age assurance on to app stores.

“There are a variety of fast-moving legislative proposals being pushed by Meta and other companies in an effort to offload their own responsibilities to keep kids safe to app stores,”  says the post. “These proposals introduce new risks to the privacy of minors, without actually addressing the harms that are inspiring lawmakers to act.”

Ghanem says Google’s framework balances responsibility between app stores and developers, in that it “has app stores securely provide industry standard age assurances only to developers who actually need them – and ensures that information is used responsibly.”

Google singles out Utah’s App Store Accountability Act as an example of legislation that it believes will only create more risks for kids. “The bill requires app stores to share if a user is a kid or teenager with all app developers (effectively millions of individual companies) without parental consent or rules on how the information is used,” Ghanem says. “That raises real privacy and safety risks, like the potential for bad actors to sell the data or use it for other nefarious purposes.”

He also argues that the bill as written “dictates how parents supervise their kids and potentially cuts teens off from digital services like educational or navigation app.”

Team App Store united on wanting developers to take more responsibility

Google’s solution is to shunt some of the responsibility back to developers of apps that host adult content, by making them – and only them – request industry standard age signals from app stores; as Ghanem says, “a weather app doesn’t need to know if a user is a kid.” Data would only be shared with permission from a user or parent, and only the required data would be shared, in keeping with data minimization principles.

While the mechanics differ slightly from Apple’s proposed age range solution, the goal is the same: put as much of the legal and operational burden as possible on developers (and take it off app stores).

To wit: its next recommendation is “appropriate safety measures within apps.”

“Under our proposal, an age signal helps a developer understand whether a user is an adult or a minor – the developer is then responsible for applying the appropriate safety and privacy protections,” Ghanem says. “Because developers know their apps best, they are best positioned to determine when and where an age-gate might be beneficial to their users.”

In aiming to ensure “responsible use of age signals,” Google also says its proposal lays out “clear consequences for developers who violate users’ trust.” And, “alongside any age assurance proposal, we support banning personalized advertisements targeting users under 18 as an industry standard.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  app stores  |  biometrics  |  children  |  data privacy  |  digital identity  |  Google  |  Meta  |  Utah