Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that for age-restricted apps, age verification should be Apple’s job. He’s now been joined in this view by the new head of trust and safety at Match, the company behind leading dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish.
Yoel Roth – who formerly had the same role in Twitter – said that Apple and Google are in a better position to accurately assess the age of their smartphone users …
‘Age verification should be Apple’s job’
This view was first voiced by Meta in November of last year.
“When a teen wants to download an app, app stores would be required to notify their parents, much like when parents are notified if their teen attempts to make a purchase,” writes Meta’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis. “Parents can decide if they want to approve the download.”
Zuckerberg personally argued for this when testifying to Congress, back in January.
In pre-prepared testimony, Meta’s Zuckerberg called for lawmakers to instead mandate regulation requiring Apple and Google app stores to verify the age of younger users.
Match joins the call
Wired has an interview with Yoel Roth, the former Twitter head of trust and safety who was one of the victims of Elon Musk’s layoffs. He’s now accepted the same role with Match Group – the company behind more than half a dozen of the biggest dating apps.
We care a lot about identifying underage users and removing them from our products. But I think there’s an opportunity for app stores to play a part in this as well. Age assurance and age verification are a challenge that lots of different companies are going to have to wrestle with—it’s included in a number of different pieces of regulation. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing here to keep underage users off of the platforms, but I’d like to see these challenges moved a bit upstream so we have better tools and signals to do that work.
Asked whether than meant Match wanted to pass the buck to Apple and Google, offloading the company’s responsibility, Roth said it was a question of which company was better placed to do the job.
I think it’s about who is well positioned in the ecosystem to have information about somebody’s age. When you are in a position like an App Store, when you have payment card information, and additional information from somebody’s device, you may have more of a signal around how old they are than just an app would.
9to5Mac’s Take
Top comment by Rodney Williams
The responsibility is on the parents to monitor their child's activities on the iPhone. Especially if the child is underage. In most cases, it's a judgment call because all underage children are not bad. There are plenty of underage children who are smart and responsible. I can recall having a discussion with my ex-wife about giving our children a smartphone, and they were still in elementary entering junior high. I told her no. They are too young. Our children got their first smartphone in high school, around 10th grade. By that time, they've shown to be responsible and sensible in whatever they do. They saw how irresponsible teenagers among their peers were with their smartphones and getting in trouble at school. Doing crazy stuff like showing porn and so forth. It is the responsibility of the companies behind these social media platforms as well as smartphones to implement protective measures on these smartphones to protect young people from the dangers of social media and other things related. Nowadays, I see young people as young as 10 years old having smartphones which I think is inappropriate unless certain settings are in place to protect the child from the potential dangers of social media. Again, everybody is different.
We’ve noted before that the motivation of these companies is of course a desire to escape legal liability. At the same time, it is true that Apple has a better idea of the age of Apple ID owners than does the developer of most apps.
There are two additional factors here. First, if we’re going to require either App Store providers or developers to collect a user’s date of birth, I’d rather than kind of sensitive information were in the hands of just one company rather than multiple developers. Second, if you asked me who I trust most to protect the privacy of sensitive information, there’s no contest.
So as self-serving as these arguments may be, I do think that having Apple and Google perform age-verification – and allow or block all age-restricted apps on that basis – is the better approach.
Photo by Alexandru Zdrobău on Unsplash
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