Kansas Can Protect Kids Online Without Sacrificing Privacy

Originally published at Kansas Policy Institute. 

Kansas parents face a real challenge: helping children navigate a digital world filled with opportunity and serious risks.

Kids deserve protection from predators, explicit content, addictive features, and scams. Parents deserve better tools. The question is how to help without creating something akin to a new digital ID system for everyone.

That is why the debate in Congress over the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) and Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran’s bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act matters. Kansas values parental responsibility, privacy, limited government, and free enterprise. Those principles should guide this debate and mirror recent debates about Kansas-based legislation aiming to protect kids online as well. 

ASAA would make app stores responsible for verifying users’ ages before downloads. While well intentioned, it would require more personal data to be collected and stored, creating new privacy and cybersecurity risks, and likely a digital ID.

It also raises costs for app developers, especially smaller companies. Ironically, regulations aimed at reining-in Big Tech make it easier for them to squash competition as they have rooms full of lawyers and compliance officers while startups do not. Big Tech can absorb the cost and drive out competitors.

That is basic economics. Higher compliance costs reduce competition, slow innovation, and leave families with fewer choices.

NetChoice argues that broad app-store age verification creates unnecessary privacy risks while failing to address the root problem. A better approach gives parents more control without requiring millions of Americans to share more personal information.

Government has an important role. It should prosecute online predators, enforce laws against exploitation, and ensure transparency (i.e., what an app does, the ads that appear within it, etc.). But it should not become the gatekeeper between every American and every app.

Sen. Moran’s POPA takes a more targeted approach by placing greater responsibility on developers while strengthening parental involvement. Congress should carefully examine every proposal, but it should avoid expanding government beyond what is necessary. Technology evolves quickly. Washington rarely does. If Washington does get around to “evolving” it too often results in regulations that help existing market players (i.e., Big Tech) while hurting smaller outfits that may try to deliver a new (child-safe) product to parents. 

Parents are better positioned than federal or state regulators to decide what is appropriate for their children. Markets also respond faster, giving families better parental controls, content filters, and safer online experiences over time.

Kansas can help lead by supporting policies that protect children without sacrificing privacy, strengthen parents instead of replacing them, and encourage innovation instead of creating new barriers.

Children deserve safer online experiences. Parents deserve better tools. And Kansans deserve policies that protect both their families and their freedom.