SIIA Seeks Veto of Texas App Store Age-Verification Bill
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) should veto a bill requiring app stores to verify users’ ages, the president of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) wrote in a Tuesday letter to the governor.
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The legislature passed SB-2420 with overwhelming margins last week (see 2505150014). But SIIA President Chris Mohr warned that the legislation, if signed into law, “will create challenges for privacy compliance for businesses and unintentional privacy invasions of Texans.”
One problem is how the Texas bill would interact with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, Mohr wrote. “COPPA requires software developers to provide direct notice and obtain verifiable parental consent to collect information from children under the age of 13. Similarly, SB 2420 requires app stores to obtain parental consent for a minor to download an app. This consent, however, does not satisfy the federal COPPA consent requirements, essentially setting up a duplicative process that places the burden on parents to provide consent twice -- once to the developer and once to an app store.”
“Both app stores and software developers have relatively little time -- just over six months – to build out an entirely new ecosystem for compliance based on legislative language that lacks any operational details,” added Mohr.