By Michaela Gordoni
The Parents Over Platforms Act is supposed to protect children online, but hundreds of organizations say it does nothing of the sort.
“Parents and child protection allies want strong legislation to protect children from harm by regulating app stores and app developers. The ‘Parents Over Platforms Act’ purports to do that but in effect does nothing to protect children – it’s a gift to Big Tech,” said Dr. Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan, Senior Adviser for AI and Emerging Technology at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. “Naturally, tech trade groups, along with Apple and Google, have endorsed POPA, while nearly all organizations that prioritize online child safety oppose. That fact alone is telling.”
NCOSE and 114 organizations from 43 states and the District of Columbia sent a letter to US Senate and House leadership calling on them to oppose POPA.
United States representative Jake Auchincloss says the bill is a better alternative to Meta’s proposed App Store Accountability Act.
Related: Meta Wants App Stores to Verify User Age: ‘A Tricky Task’
He said POPA would make it so that a parent sets up an app store account for their child’s smartphone and sets an indicator for their child’s age range. Then, apps would provide different experiences based on a user’s age.
Meta’s act is more thorough and requires more parental protection for each app.
Gaetan says, “The preemption language in POPA, which prevents states from regulating in the same areas as the bill, removes the opportunity for states to make truly effective child safety legislation. The bill’s limitation of liability prioritizes app stores and app developers, requiring them to make only a ‘good faith effort’ to comply with the bill. That’s simply not enough to protect children from harm. Congress must reject POPA.”
The Age Verification Providers’ association agrees. POPA doesn’t put parents in control and offers children little more protection than they get today.
“The irony is that the platforms this proposed US Federal bill targets need do almost nothing new to comply with it, leaving parents no better off than today — while the Big Tech app store operators (primarily Apple and Google) that control access to almost every phone and tablet quietly gain yet more data and power. It should have been called the Platforms Over Parents Act,” the organization stated.
POPA doesn’t require age verification, only a declaration, and offers the app store a liability shield, and it hardly requires anything from app stores.
AVPA states that app stores “already ask users their age at account setup, already offer parental controls, and already share some age data. This bill codifies what they do today and calls it child protection, creating a dangerous false sense of safety.”
It pointed out that most social media platforms and all websites will be unaffected by POPA. It actually creates more surveillance risk because app stores will “have a strong incentive to anchor those signals in hardware attestation, locking them as the critical gatekeepers for access to age-restricted services across the entire app ecosystem, and creating new, unregulated opportunities to track and profile their users’ behavior across every age-restricted service they access.”
The bill preempts states laws and would undo the safety frameworks they’ve developed. California, Colorado, Texas, Utah and others have already enacted or are developing age assurance laws.
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