OS platforms have a responsibility to do age verification

I don’t fully understand the bill proposed in Lousiana that would have forced App Stores to enact age restrictions. ¹ I’m not sure that age restrictions at the App Store-level on apps is the way to go. However, I do think that there should be a secure API for physical devices to report if users are over a certain age, and I think that should be available to web browsers.

I think we need to permit and preserve the right to access adult content while still permitting protecting children. Rather than pointless dropdowns asking for your birthdate (like many online alcohol ordering services have, for example), there should be an API request that activates a passkey-like biometric authentication that will report back TRUE or FALSE. We should let apps and websites ask a device, “Is the current user over a certain age?” Maybe limit that to a few ages (in the US, 13, 18, and 21 would cover nearly all age-related restrictions) or have some kind of rate limiting (once asking for an age verification, you cannot change the age you verified for 3 minutes or something).

This way, if there’s content that we want to only show to those above a certain age, you can do so with some confidence. Maybe this can only be done in states that adopt the ISO 18013-5 standard– if you want to get age checks from the platform, adopt and provide identification that can be loaded electronically onto our devices. I worry a little bit about this because the US has a terrible history of limiting access to state IDs for all kinds of marginalized groups. But I think there’s something to be done here by the platforms. This is a level of safety that I think we should hold the duopoly platforms take on, but once, in a uniform, standards-based way. Not state by state, or even to a degree, country by country.