Apple announced on Thursday that it will implement a system allowing parents to share their child’s age with app developers without disclosing sensitive details like birthdays or government IDs.
This initiative comes as various U.S. lawmakers at both state and federal levels are considering age-verification regulations for social media and other applications. States like Utah and South Carolina are currently discussing laws that would mandate app store operators, including Apple and Google’s Alphabet, to verify the ages of their users.
This situation has sparked a debate within the tech industry regarding who should be responsible for age verification for users under 18 app stores or individual apps.
Meta has consistently advocated for legislation that would require app stores to verify ages when children download applications.
Apple stated on Thursday that it does not wish to take on the responsibility of collecting sensitive data for age verification purposes.
“While only a fraction of apps on the App Store may require age verification, all users would have to hand over their sensitive personally identifying information to us-regardless of whether they actually want to use one of these limited set of apps,” Apple wrote in a whitepaper on its website.
As a solution, Apple plans to introduce a feature called “age assurance.” This will allow parents to enter their child’s age when creating an account.
Parents can then opt to let their child share a “declared age range” with third-party app developers instead of providing an exact birthday or other identifying information. They will also have the option to disable age-range sharing.
“This protects privacy by keeping parents in control of their kids’ sensitive personal information, while minimizing the amount of information that is shared with third parties,” Apple said in its paper.
In a statement, Stephanie Otway, a Meta spokeswoman, said the Apple technology is “a positive first step” but it still requires the child to share age range data with the developer, which will make it more difficult for Meta to put to use.
“Parents tell us they want to have the final say over the apps their teens use, and that’s why we support legislation that requires app stores to verify a child’s age and get a parent’s approval before their child downloads an app,” Otway said.
Apple’s existing controls already require parental approval for children to download an app.
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