As more of our children’s lives move online, staying involved has only gotten harder — as I’m sure every parent can attest.
To make sure young people can’t access obviously dangerous things, we have laws to verify age. Walk into any store in Michigan and try to buy something meant for adults — tobacco, alcohol, a lottery ticket — and the law requires the seller to check your ID. However, for most of the internet, where our children spend hours every day, access is completely unlimited. There’s no reason the digital world should play by different rules; it’s time we brought that same commonsense standard to the app store.
I don’t think the government should be raising anyone’s children, and I don’t think Silicon Valley should either. That job belongs to parents. The real question is whether we give parents the tools to be a part of their kids’ digital lives, or if we leave teens to fend for themselves on an internet filled with dangers.
Some countries, like Australia, have answered that question with heavy-handed mandates — outright bans that take the decision away from families entirely. Other proposals involve forcing users to set up separate age checks and hand over private information to every single app, one at a time. These approaches don’t work. They bury parents in paperwork and scatter a family’s sensitive data across dozens of companies, creating exactly the kind of privacy risk we should be guarding against.
There is a better way, however. The app store is where families already set up and manage their kids’ phones. It is the one natural checkpoint every download passes through. Verify a user’s age there, once, and require a parent’s approval before a minor downloads an app, and you have handed parents real authority without standing up to a new bureaucracy or asking them to repeat the same process 40 times over.
That is exactly what the App Store Accountability Act would do at the federal level. At its core, it is about putting parents back at the door. Right now, when a child downloads an app, no one asks the parent — the decision gets made for them, by companies with every reason to keep that child engaged.
The App Store Accountability Act changes that. It requires app stores to actually verify a user’s age and obtain simple, verifiable parental consent before a minor downloads an app, which means the people who know that child best are the ones deciding what comes through the door.
That isn’t a restriction on families; it’s a tool for them. Parental approval is empowerment — it gives moms and dads real say over their kids’ online lives instead of leaving them to find out after the fact what their children have already been handed. I’m proud that one of its leading champions in Congress is a fellow Michiganian, Rep. John James, R-Shelby Township, who introduced the bill in the House and understands that holding app stores accountable is common sense, not government overreach.
But not every proposal that invokes the app store actually solves the problem, and we have to be honest about the counterfeit versions floating around. Some measures like the Parents Over Platforms Act put the age question on the app store but then let a child declare their own age, with nothing behind it.
A safeguard that depends on the very person it is meant to restrict is no safeguard at all. It just lets Big Tech say it acted while nothing actually changes.
Michigan families shouldn’t have to wait on Washington to protect their teens. I believe our state should advance a complementary App Store Accountability measure of its own — one that functions the same way, reinforces the federal effort and makes sure that the moment this protection becomes law, Michigan parents are already covered. A strong state standard also sends an unmistakable message to Congress and to the tech companies: parents are done being ignored.
This is fundamentally about bringing our real-life principles online. At the end of the day, we all want the same thing: kids who can grow up safe, enjoy what’s good about the internet without being exposed to what they aren’t ready for, and who have a parent looking out for them.
That is what the App Store Accountability Act delivers. It gives families a simple, dependable way to protect their children without shutting them out of the digital world they are growing up in. Our kids deserve that kind of care, and the tools to provide it already exist.
Rep. Bryan Posthumus, R-Rockford, represents Michigan’s 90th House District.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Kids deserve protection online. Parents deserve a say. | Opinion
Reporting by Bryan Posthumus / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Bryan Posthumus | USA TODAY Network
