There is a vital global conversation underway about how to best protect young people online. Governments worldwide are introducing a range of proposals, from restrictions on personalized feeds and screen time to outright social media bans. While these proposals share a crucial goal that we support, they often overlook a major practical hurdle: how platforms can safely and accurately verify a teen’s age.
For any of these proposals to succeed, apps must know the age of their users. But proving age on the internet remains a complex, industrywide challenge. Many teens don’t have traditional government IDs, and requiring people to upload sensitive personal documents to every individual app they download creates significant privacy risks. Furthermore, smaller or emerging platforms often lack the robust security infrastructure required to safeguard this data, which can inadvertently expose millions of people to security breaches.
Protecting young people online should not come at the expense of privacy. That’s why parents and safety advocates overwhelmingly support a simpler, more secure approach: centralizing age verification and parental consent in the app store. By handling age verification once at the device level, we can provide young people with consistent, age-appropriate experiences across the many apps they use while keeping their personal data safe.
Unintended Consequences of Bans
We understand the immense pressure lawmakers face to act, and we respect every government’s right to decide what’s best for their citizens. But any truly viable safety proposal must solve the underlying challenge of how to uniformly and accurately understand a person’s age.
Australia’s under-16 social media ban highlights just how complex this logistical piece remains. Because the policy was introduced without an established, privacy-preserving method for age verification, it has led to the unintended consequences safety experts feared: reports of teens bypassing inconsistent age checks, circumventing restrictions, and migrating to unmonitored apps and gaming sites that fall outside the scope of the ban.
This shift actually makes the internet less safe for young people. When teens access platforms through workarounds, they lose the built-in protections, like Teen Accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger, specifically designed to keep them safe. These concerns are shared globally; a joint statement from over 370 international academics and privacy experts warned that enforcing broad bans carries massive risks to privacy and autonomy if age verification isn’t built on a coherent, secure foundation. They’re right. If we get this wrong, we create entirely new risks for everyone online.
While Meta will always comply with local laws, current legislative proposals simply do not address these complex age issues — and that should give global lawmakers pause.
The Path Forward
There is a practical framework that directly answers the complex logistical challenges I’ve laid out: centralizing age verification and parental approval at the app store level. App stores are already the gateway through which teens access every app on their phones. And we don’t have to start from scratch. Apple and Google already collect age information when a parent sets up their teen’s phone, and they already have systems in place to obtain parental approval before teens can make purchases. We’re simply asking that this same mechanism be extended to all app downloads. By verifying a person’s age just once at this device level, the phone itself acts as a single, secure checkpoint. This allows parents to seamlessly approve or deny downloads across all platforms simultaneously, removing the need for people to upload sensitive personal documentation to dozens of individual apps.
Over the past year, more than half of U.S. states have introduced app-store age legislation of this kind, with Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, and California already enacting versions of it — driven largely by parents. Momentum is also building in Washington, where the App Store Accountability Act is advancing through Congress.
Public support is clear: polls show that 85% of American parents support requiring app stores to verify age and get parental approval before teens download apps. Eighty-two percent of Australian parents and nearly 75% of parents across eight European countries support parental approval. Major industry players like Match Group, X, Snap, and Pinterest have also endorsed this approach.
The Core Question
We will continue to comply with laws around the world as they evolve. But the conversation should always come back to the same core question: how will we, as a society, reliably verify age on the internet? Until we answer that question honestly, everything else is a workaround.
