Congress, once again, is at risk of letting good intentions lead to policy that is both ineffective and almost certain to bring unintended consequences. Recently, the App Store Accountability Act took another step forward, making it out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Among other things, the ASAA would require app stores, such as the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, to verify user ages and mandate parental consent for users under 18.
While aimed at protecting children online, this bill would fail to promote the safety of minors, risk pushing children to more dangerous websites with less visibility for parents, and endanger sensitive data.
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It’s true that the internet, despite providing benefits such as connection and broader access to information, is full of harrowing material, and that threats to children online are, sadly, ubiquitous. However, the ASAA would not ameliorate this reality. Instead, Congress should focus on keeping children within safer, more regulated online environments while reinforcing parental oversight and developer responsibility.
Rather than protecting children online, age verification requirements for app stores may inadvertently push kids into harm’s way. Parents already have tools at their disposal to oversee and help direct their children’s app usage. However, store-wide age verification requirements, by aggressively increasing the cost of access, would incentivize tech-savvy minors to seek ways to avoid the required parental approval under the ASAA and would lead some to access content via unregulated websites instead of app stores. In the United Kingdom, age verification requirements have already been avoided either by using fake credentials or VPNs, or by moving to unregulated spaces that often display more extreme content.
App stores already invest heavily in child safety, whereas many websites host dangerous and extreme content while evading regulation and law enforcement. App stores have far more accountability than any given website: Google and Apple are known, regulated entities with parental control tools, while random websites are often beyond parents’ oversight and may be offshore and run by anonymous operators, rendering any regulatory enforcement difficult.
By creating such an onerous process for app store access, Congress would unwittingly push minors to more dangerous areas of the internet that are far harder to regulate.
In addition to pushing children to riskier online spaces, the ASAA would create a major data risk. Age verification mandates require individuals to share sensitive data, such as government-issued identification or possibly even biometric information.
This requirement would not apply to just children. Even adults would have to provide age-identifying information for app store access — to download faith-based apps or innocuous games, as well as social media platforms and apps with adult-oriented content.
The vast, centralized data collection required under the ASAA would create a flashing target for hackers. In fact, this has already played out. In 2025, an age verification firm was the victim of a massive hack, and 70,000 Discord users may have had their photo IDs exposed.
Alternative solutions, such as the Parents Over Platforms Act, present lighter-touch regulations and, as a result, pose less risk of incentivizing tech-centered evasions or for people moving from apps to sketchier websites. POPA, while not without its own problems, has the benefit of requiring parents, app stores, and app developers all to play a role in child safety without requiring the same trove of sensitive data as the ASAA.
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As Congress works through how to address child safety online, it needs to be cautious about requiring the central collection of sensitive data. Congress also ought not place all of the onus on app stores, as this risks pushing children to less regulated, more dangerous spaces and provides parents with a false sense of security. Requiring strict, pre-download approval can counterintuitively reduce oversight in the home, particularly after an app has already been downloaded, as parents might assume all necessary due diligence has been completed before installation.
Legislatures do not have to sit on their hands, nor should they — child safety online is of paramount importance. However, the ASAA is not the answer.
Benjamin Ayanian is a student at the University of Minnesota Law School, a widely published commentator, and author of “Beyond Intention: How Progressive Economic Initiatives Would Harm Society’s Most Vulnerable.“ Follow him on X @BenjaminAyanian.