Pinterest lines up behind Meta to endorse App Store Accountability Act

Pinterest has endorsed Utah Senator Mike Lee’s App Store Accountability Act (ASA), which puts the onus on mobile app stores to conduct age assurance and requires parental consent for downloads. In a release, Lee says “app stores need reliable age verification, parental controls, and safeguards against exploitation demanded by concerned parents across America.”

Pinterest’s move is in keeping with its peers, including Meta, which has celebrated the law for taking some of the responsibility off individual sites and platforms. The ASA links minor-owned accounts to a parental account, requires annual certifications and a complaint mechanism, and prohibits the sale of age-related data collected for verification.

In urging Congress to pass the ASA, Bill Ready, CEO of Pinterest, says he believes “parents need a single, privacy-preserving solution to verify their child’s age and know they’re safe online. Making the app store a one-stop shop for age verification ensures children are protected from the moment they start using a device.”

This closely echoes Meta’s statement from March on Utah’s app store law, which said “parents want a one-stop-shop to oversee and approve the many apps their teens want to download, and Utah has led the way in centralizing it within a device’s app store.”

Both Pinterest and Meta are members of NetChoice, which Silicon Valley has deployed as its litigatory kaiju to stamp out age verification laws for platforms whenever they flare up.

“Pinterest joins Meta, Instagram, and Snapchat in calling for stronger protections for children’s online safety,” says the release, demonstrating just how spun the arguments have become. Consider, as a counterpoint, the recent court filing on behalf of 33 states, which alleges that Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube purposefully designed defective products that are addictive and harmful for teens.

AVPA cites proximity principle, corrects Meta on terminology

It can be assumed, then, that Big Tech is behaving as Big Tech does, and making bad faith claims that work to its favor. Commentary from the Age Verification Providers’ Association (AVPA) calls attention to the language Meta has used to drum up support for age assurance at the app store level, in its ongoing efforts to sway Canadian lawmakers.

While Meta likes to say it supports age verification done right, its suggested approach “still hinges on users providing their age when creating an app-store account,” AVPA says – which still counts as self-declaration, even if it is done by a parent, and not as highly effective age verification, or indeed verification at all.

“Even if app stores provided a reliable age signal, it would only address one point in the chain,” AVPA argues. “Risks often arise inside services where content, contact, livestreaming, messaging and AI interactions differ significantly between apps. This is why regulators internationally increasingly emphasise the ‘proximity principle’: safety checks should occur as close as possible to the risk, not solely at an upstream gateway.”

With pressure from all sides, age assurance will only swell

The nature of the debate over age assurance measures for social platforms means neither side is liable to cede ground easily. Mark Zuckerberg, who since his twenties and arguably forever has lived a life isolated by extreme wealth, does not relent willingly. On the other hand, legislators’ anger grows as more of their constituents come to their offices asking why social media was allowed to kill their kids.

With legislative momentum growing for age checks at the device level and the site level, an increasingly likely result is that regulations will cover both, and more. The maximalist scenario is what AVPA might call “blended, interoperable models that combine parental tools, app- and site-level age checks, neutral third-party verification, privacy-preserving tokens and standards and regulatory oversight that preserves competition.”

In a nutshell, AVPA’s stance is that a healthy ecosystem is one in which “independent, interoperable, standards-based age-assurance providers remain part of the mix.”

Meanwhile, an editorial from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) argues that app store age assurance is “popular in principle, unworkable in practice.” But it also dislikes IDs, facial age estimation, and really anything that would change the status quo for its members. Effectively a lengthy tirade on why age assurance of any sort is bad, the piece has the novel feature of offering nothing as an alternative save one paragraph: “Policymakers should pivot from universal ID checks to risk-proportionate approaches that minimize sensitive data collection: device-level parental tools, privacy-preserving age-range attestations, and targeted enforcement against bad-actors.”

The irony, of course, being that “targeted enforcement against bad actors” is exactly what age assurance laws are trying to be.

Embrace data minimization as a core principle: Jumio

In the end, regardless of where they stand on the proper place for age checks, companies will need to prioritize data minimization. So says Joe Kaufmann, global head of privacy at Jumio. In comments emailed to Biometric Update, Kaufmann says “organizations can reduce downstream risks like data repurposing or a data breach by leveraging detailed, multisource trust signals to maintain auditable evidence of age verification, instead of storing large quantities of sensitive data.”

“Reducing the stored data helps on the front-end, but companies will get ongoing benefits from reducing the feasibility for social engineering or human error when providing access to systems that process or store age verification information.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  app store age verification  |  AVPA  |  biometric age estimation  |  Jumio  |  legislation