A pair of powerful California lawmakers is teaming up to pass legislation that would require device manufacturers to ascertain the age of users, with the goal of providing kids with age-appropriate online experiences.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Tom Umberg (D) and Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks (D) announced Tuesday that they will work together to advance the Digital Age Assurance Act.
The bill, for which language was not immediately available, borrows from model legislation from the International Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which endorsed the measure. Wicks and Umberg said their bill seeks to give kids safer experiences online while balancing privacy and security considerations.
“The Digital Age Assurance Act is a crucial step in ensuring kids can explore the digital world more safely — and a critical step needed for us to require social media and other online companies to implement higher consumer safety standards for products accessed by kids,” Wicks said in a statement.
Wicks led to passage in 2022 the nation’s first Age-Appropriate Design Code law, which requires higher privacy and design protections for minors online. That law is currently on hold pending a tech industry legal challenge.
The new bill’s arrival follows passage last month of Utah’s first-in-the-nation law to require that app stores verify users’ ages and send an age “signal” to app developers. Similar bills have been introduced in more than a dozen states.
The push to put the age verification onus on app stores has gained momentum in states after a wave of bills to require parental permission for youth to download social media apps. Meta, Snap and X have backed the effort, as has a coalition of more than 50 youth advocacy groups that formed the Digital Childhood Alliance.
Read more: Utah is first to pass app store age verification law
The California proposal takes a different approach, moving upstream from the app store to the device level. It would require device makers to send a signal from their operating systems to the app stores regarding the device’s user’s age.
In both cases, the bills target Apple and Google as both the makers of the most popular mobile devices and operators of the largest app stores. The companies did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment on the California bill.
Chamber of Progress, a tech industry group whose partner companies include Apple and Google, said in a statement that the legislation would jeopardize California residents’ speech and privacy rights.
“We’ve been warning lawmakers for over a year that age estimation and parental consent laws harm vulnerable groups the most,” Todd O’Boyle, Chamber of Progress’s vice president of technology, said in a statement.
Under the California bill, device makers would be required to provide an “easy-to-use interface” whereby users would enter their date of birth. Most devices already require this during initial setup. That age information, which device makers would not be required to verify, would then be transmitted to app stores. App developers in turn would receive a signal from the app store telling them a user’s age range: “13-15” or “16-17,” for example.
App developers would have to obtain a parent’s permission before allowing someone younger than 16 to download an app. Developers would also have to provide parents with ways to manage their child’s account, including the ability to limit how much time minors are on a particular app.
California’s attorney general would enforce the law. Intentional violations could bring fines of up to $7,500 per child.
“California’s children are growing up in an online world with no guardrails, leaving them vulnerable to cyberbullying, sextortion, mental health struggles and more. This is simply unacceptable,” Wicks said.
“Social media and games that allow youth, in particular, to interact, can be fun and educational,” Umberg said, “but when experiences turn sour in unavoidable numbers, it’s our job as a legislature to say ‘enough is enough.’”