Apple CEO Tim Cook was yesterday spotted in Washington, D.C. during a visit to lobby against a proposed App Store age verification policy.
But the very argument the company uses to oppose the proposal is in fact the strongest argument in favour of it …
The App Store age verification proposal
As we reported last week, there has been growing momentum behind the idea that app stores, rather than individual developers, should be held legally responsible for verifying the age of users. That has now culminated in a new proposed law, the App Store Accountability Act.
Instead of users having to prove their age to a whole bunch of individual developers each time they download an app with a minimum age requirement, the idea is that we would do so once to either Apple or Google, and the company would then age-gate apps as appropriate.
Apple is lobbying against this
Apple has consistently opposed this idea, and Cook was in Washington yesterday to lobby against it. The company’s privacy head, Hilary Ware, summarized the company’s position in a letter to Congress.
In the letter, Ware expressed that the proposed law “could threaten the privacy of all users by forcing millions of adults to surrender their private information for the simple act of downloading an app.”
The company is painting the proposal as a threat to privacy. The reality, however, is the opposite.
Privacy is why the proposal should succeed
As I argued last week, it is not a choice between surrendering private information to prove our age or not. The question is whether we do so scores of times to a random bunch of developers or once only to Apple.
Forcing users to hand over government photo ID and video selfies to an endless array of developers is a privacy nightmare. I’d far rather trust Apple to verify identity and age once, and then simply block downloads of age-inappropriate apps.
It would also be a way better user experience if each of us only had to verify our age one time, rather than every single time we downloaded a new age-gated app.
I fully understand why Apple doesn’t want legal responsibility, but I think this is inevitably the way things will go, and the company would be far better off embracing it and positioning itself as the one company that can be trusted to do this in a privacy-respecting manner.
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