Days after Utah lawmakers passed the nation’s first app store age verification law, Google is signaling support for the broader concept if significant changes are made.
In a blog post Wednesday, Google’s director of public policy, Kareem Ghanem, said the Utah bill and others like it that are supported by Meta and other social media companies “fall short.” Google is instead encouraging “a more comprehensive legislative framework that shares responsibility between app stores and developers, and protects children’s privacy and the decision rights of parents.”
The app store age verification fight has pitted Apple and Google, operators of the two largest app stores, against Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. Apple helped kill an app store age verification bill in Louisiana last year.
This marked the first time Google has publicly weighed in on app store age verification proposals in the states. The announcement is also notable because the tech industry has historically fought age verification requirements on constitutional grounds, an issue that is the subject of extensive ongoing litigation and has reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In his post, Ghanem said Google supports the idea of protecting youth online and ensuring they have age-appropriate experiences. But he challenged the approach backed by Meta, Snap and X that puts the onus on app stores to verify the age of users and then share that information with app developers, who would have to get parental permission before a minor downloaded an app.
Citing the Utah bill, Ghanem said requiring app stores to broadly share age information with all app developers “raises real privacy and safety risks.”
“This level of data sharing isn’t necessary — a weather app doesn’t need to know if a user is a kid,” Ghanem wrote.
Bills similar to Utah’s have been introduced in more than a dozen states this year, including Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, South Carolina and South Dakota.
App store age verification has been endorsed by more than 50 child advocacy organizations, which recently formed the Digital Childhood Alliance to advocate for passage of app store laws.
Google’s “legislative framework” would still require app stores to verify user ages. But instead of sharing that information with all app makers, it would only be transmitted to those whose products “may be risky for minors” and only if the youth’s parent consented. It was not immediately clear if Google-owned YouTube would be among them.
“By just sharing with developers who need to deliver age-appropriate experiences, and only sharing the minimum amount of data needed to provide an age signal, it reduces the risk of sensitive information being shared broadly,” Ghanem wrote.
Meta, which has led the push for app store age verification bills at the state and federal level, said in a statement that it welcomed “Google’s concession that they can share age information with app developers, and we agree this should be done in a privacy-preserving manner.
“But with millions of apps on Google’s app store, and more added every day, it’s unclear how they’ll determine which apps are eligible to receive this data,” Meta said. “The simplest way to protect teens online is to put parents in charge. That’s why legislation should require app stores to obtain parental consent before allowing children to download apps.”
Google says its approach to age verification would create shared responsibility between the app stores and app developers, with developers deciding if their product should have an age gate and, if so, then determining what experience young users should have when interacting with their product.
Other elements of Google’s proposal include: penalties for developers who improperly access or share an age signal; creating a “centralized dashboard” where parents could “manage their children’s online activities across different apps in one place;” and a blanket ban on personalized ads targeting minors, a practice Google said it has long “disallowed.”
Google confirmed to Pluribus News it has shared proposed bill text with state lawmakers, but it would not say which lawmakers in which states and has not made that language public.
“Google has demonstrated our commitment to doing our part to keep kids safe online,” Ghanem wrote in the blog post. “We’re ready to build on this work and will continue engaging with lawmakers and developers on how to move this legislative framework for age assurance forward.”
Apple last month announced new privacy and safety features for 2025, including the option for parents to share their child’s age range with app developers “to enable developers to provide only age-appropriate content.”