Last month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that would require app stores to verify the age of their users and require parental consent for users under 18 to download apps. Among the bill’s top supporters, if the fact that it bankrolled a wildly expensive [...]
Meta’s push for Texas’s new age-verification law—requiring app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors—appears, at first, to be about child safety. In reality, it’s a strategic move to shift legal risk. While marketed as a way to ease compliance for smaller developers, the law [...]
At the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recent workshop, The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families, panelists raised important questions about children’s online safety but offered few practical, evidence-based solutions. Instead, they promoted policies, such as the App Store Accountability Act and similar age verification [...]
As App Store Accountability Act proponents put more chum in the water, one particular red herring stands out. Specifically, some of the proponents of the bills argue that because minors’ use of an app store involves an agreement, a statutory mandate should exist for app stores to obtain parental [...]
"We regret to inform you that a vendor was hacked, exposing our customers' personal information." It’s a message that has become all too familiar as data breaches shift from possibility to inevitability. At SXSW 2025, ACT | The App Association hosted a powerhouse panel to dissect the growing crisis [...]
