Connecticut, Texas, Oregon, and other states are concluding their legislative sessions this month with the passage of new laws aimed at expanding data privacy protections and limiting children’s access to online platforms. These measures seek to broaden existing statutes to include more companies and categories of information.
In Texas, a new measure has faced criticism from the R Street Institute, a nonpartisan public policy research organization. The group urged Governor Abbott in May to veto the bill. “As we advised in testimony to the Texas Senate in March, we are concerned that ‘instead of empowering parents, S.B. 2420 merely imposes a government mandate to replicate protections that are already easily available to them’ and that ‘it erects barriers to accessing speech and content for all mobile device users and creates novel data privacy and security problems,'” stated the organization.
The R Street Institute further explained that regardless of how the law is enforced, residents would be compelled to provide significant amounts of sensitive personal data to app stores for age verification purposes. This could increase the risk of misuse or theft of such information. “It would be impossible for app stores to implement the level of age verification required by S.B. 2420 without collecting more data on all of their users than they do presently,” they asserted. They also noted that even the most accurate age estimation services available have error rates necessitating additional evidence like a state ID for many users.