I began my professional life as an accountant. But after two decades in the profession, I realized I wanted something more.
As a relatively new father, I was thinking about my own mortality and how my family would remember me when I was gone. Two years ago, I launched an app that allows users to capture moments, advice and family narratives today, and deliver them to loved ones years — or even decades — later.
But not all apps are as family-friendly or appropriate for children as mine. And that’s OK — everyone has a right to produce content that is not appropriate for children, and adults certainly have a right to access that kind of content.
As both a dad and an app owner, I believe the government has a responsibility to protect children online from adult-oriented experiences, like sexual content on social media, or from accessing dating apps.
Unfortunately, some Georgia lawmakers think a law they have proposed is a good idea.
The result, Senate Bill 467, lets the most concerning apps off the hook, while making it harder for safe, family-friendly apps to find users and grow.
Small-app developers are put at a disadvantage
First, SB 467 falls short of protecting children online because it contains loopholes that let large apps completely off the hook.
The bill doesn’t capture apps that pay device manufacturers to be pre-installed, or that users can download directly from a website. It also doesn’t capture websites, console games or virtual reality platforms. What’s worse, the bill doesn’t even require the makers of apps it regulates to do anything to ensure kids aren’t accessing adult content.
While doing nothing about the most concerning apps, the bill would also burden apps like mine.
Instead of holding social media companies and dating services accountable for what they allow kids to do on their platforms, the bill requires every app to receive and store an age signal from the app store for every user, regardless of whether the app is geared toward adults.
Every new feature or function, particularly one that involves user data, has a cost to build. It’s estimated that building the capability to receive and store age signals would cost small teams more than $20,000. For small apps like mine, that is a tremendous cost.
Bill poses threat to freedom of speech
The bill also requires parental consent for every app a child downloads. Currently, as a parent, I have many options for controls I can implement on my kids’ devices. Parents can filter the apps their kids can download by age rating, require consent for downloading all or only certain rated apps and set limits on screen time.
Requiring devices and app stores to offer these options to parents makes sense, but a blanket requirement that every kid needs a parent’s consent to download any app doesn’t.
Under SB 467, a kid can try to download a social media app, their parents can approve the download, and then the kid can be shown all kinds of adult-oriented content on the app, with the social media company bearing no responsibility or liability.
Meanwhile, I would have to create the ability to receive an age signal, store it securely, and countless kids won’t be able to download my app for days, or weeks, or ever, because their parents have a backlog of app requests to approve. I am not a lawyer, but this would also seem to raise free speech issues if everyone had to verify their age to download any app.
To me, and the vast majority of app makers providing general-purpose or kid-appropriate apps, this approach just does not make sense. The apps that provide adult-oriented or age-based experiences should be responsible for ensuring kids aren’t using them or having age-inappropriate experiences.
I urge Georgia lawmakers to take a different approach. One that applies evenly to all apps, websites, console games and virtual reality, and isn’t the equivalent of requiring a convenience store to card every customer, regardless of what they buy, or requiring toy stores to get parents’ approval before a kid purchases any game.
Quin Christian is the founder of Fyouture, an Atlanta-based digital memory- and messaging-preservation app.
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