• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 5, 2025

Utah on Wednesday became the first state in the country to pass a bill that would require Google, Apple and other app distributors to verify users' ages and then block  minors under 18 from downloading apps without parental permission.

The App Store Accountability Act (SB 142), which was passed 64-3 by the state House and 21-1 by the state Senate, now heads to Governor Spencer Cox for signature.

The state legislature's move comes 16 months after Meta Platforms proposed that app stores -- generally defined in the bill as publicly available sites or services that allow people to download apps from third-party developers -- should be required to obtain parental permission before allowing minors to obtain apps.

“Parents should approve their teen’s app downloads, and we support federal legislation that requires app stores to get parents’ approval whenever their teens under 16 download apps,” Meta's Antigone Davis, global safety head, wrote in November 2023.

Since then, legislation requiring parental approval for app downloads has been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, as well as Utah and several other states.

The tech funded group Chamber of Progress opposed the Utah bill, arguing that requiring app stores to verify users' ages would compromise their privacy.

“Estimating the age of a user would require collecting more data, acting contrary to minimization ... efforts,” the Chamber of Progress's Kouri Marshall testified to Utah lawmakers.

The group's legal advocacy counsel, Kerry Maeve Sheehan, argued in a separate blog post that the measure would violate the First Amendment by forcing minors and adults “to choose between sacrificing their privacy by disclosing sensitive personal information (their own or, in the case of a minor user’s parents, their children’s) and accessing legally protected online speech.”

She added that courts throughout the country have held that minors generally have a First Amendment right to access speech.

Utah recently passed a separate law, the Minor Protection in Social Media Act, which would have required platforms to limit the ability of a minor under 18 to send direct messages or share information with users who in the minor's network. That law also would have required platforms to disable push notifications and automatically playing content on minors' accounts.

A federal judge blocked enforcement of that law last year, ruling that it likely violates the First Amendment. Utah recently asked the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the block.