John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
PIERRE — A South Dakota House of Representatives panel endorsed a bill that would require mobile app stores to use age verification to control access by minors.
House Bill 1275 passed the House State Affairs Committee 8-3 on Wednesday and heads to the House floor with a “do pass” recommendation.
The bill is the second attempt in as many years by state lawmakers to put the onus of age-gating on app stores. House Bill 1275 would force the mobile stores to verify a person’s age, require parents to approve app downloads for underage users and include age ratings for the apps.
The bill “gives parents of minor children a simple, private way to keep their kids safer online,” said its prime sponsor, Sioux Falls Republican Rep. John Hughes. “It establishes guardrails at the digital gateway.”
App-based age gating has only emerged as an online protection measure for children in the past few years, a time period during which the pace of discussion on protecting children has quickened in statehouses around the U.S. Many states, including South Dakota, have passed laws requiring pornographic websites to verify users’ ages.
The app-based age gating proposal has the support of companies like Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and the opposition of Apple and Google, which operate the largest app stores in the U.S.
The social media platforms argue that app stores are better suited to protect children, as they already act as gatekeepers for access to the apps upon which questionable content would appear, and typically have the credit card information necessary to verify that a person is 18 or older. The app stores argue that they already offer extensive parental control features, and that app developers need to act to protect kids.
At the time lawmakers rejected an app-based age-gating bill from Sioux Falls Republican Sen. Sue Peterson last year, no state had passed such bills.
At this point, four state legislatures have endorsed them — Texas, Utah, Alabama and Louisiana.
“The Legislature wasn’t comfortable going in first, but now there are four,” said Norman Woods, who testified in support for a group called Family Voice Action.
Other supporters included the South Dakota Attorney General’s office, Concerned Women for America and the South Dakota Catholic Conference.
App industry: Invasion of privacy
Opponents included Doug Abraham, a lobbyist for The App Association. He said requiring age verification for access to an app store with potential adult content is akin to requiring it for entry into a mall with a liquor store.
He also said the proposal would require app stores to have more data about children, as companies would need to know their ages, and he suggested that “all South Dakotans” would need to give copies of their state-issued IDs “to big tech.”
“It’s going to force you, if you want to use your iPhone, or you want to use your Android-based device, to do that, even though you’re 18, even though you’re a consenting adult,” Abraham said.
The bill legislates parenting, Abraham said, and is unnecessary because app stores already offer the tools the bill would mandate to any parent who cares enough to use them.
Kouri Marshall, a lobbyist for a tech coalition called Chamber of Progress, called the bill “a tremendous encroachment on individual privacy” that’s likely to cost the state in legal fees.
Alabama, whose lawmakers passed a version of the bill earlier this month, “is going straight to court,” Marshall said, to defend itself in a lawsuit alleging the rules violate the First Amendment.
South Dakota should “wait and see how this plays out in court, so that you don’t end up there,” Marshall said, noting that Florida and Mississippi lawmakers said no to app-based age gating.
Bill endorsed as protection for children
Woods, the lobbyist for Family Voice Action, said in a rebuttal that the idea that South Dakotans would need to share driver’s license data is false, as credit card information is typically enough to verify a person’s age.
And Rep. Leslie Heinemann, R-Flandreau, said legal fees are worth the fight if it means protecting kids from harmful content or access to apps that could connect them with predators. He compared it to last year’s bill requiring age verification by adult websites, which he said parents thanked him for backing.
“I see it as a way to bring to the parents that we have a way of dealing with this issue on a large scale,” Heinemann said.
Rep. Erin Healy, D-Sioux Falls, referenced her own 13-year-old to explain her opposition to the bill. She said her husband got an alert when the teen did a web search for information on former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
“I think that just shows the effort that can already be put into parental controls,” said Healy, who was one of three committee members who voted against sending the bill to the full House of Representatives.