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An Alabama House committee Wednesday held a public hearing and carried over a bill that would create restrictions for minors attempting to download apps and enter into contractual agreements with app store providers. Parents would be notified about the download and could then approve or decline the contract between the child and the app provider.
HB317, sponsored by Chris Sells, R-Greenville, would also require the app store provider to present certain information to parents, like the age rating of the app or how it shares information with third parties.
Sells said that regulating the app store was the most succinct method for regulating how the internet reaches children. This bill is part of a package to address child safety online.
“We’ve done several bills about protecting our police officers… this is about protecting our children,” said Sells. “Children, we put them in cars, we obey speed limits, we put seatbelts on them and put them in child’s seats. We do different things to protect our children to come up with one goal, and that’s what we’re doing here today.”
With teens on over 40 apps a week, each with different terms of services and access to personal data, it can be hard for guardians to keep up. Christy Horn, a resident of Madison, Alabama who works at the National Institute on Sexual Exploitation and is a proponent of the bill, said that the current system isn’t designed to keep parents informed and these protections are essential.
“HB317 is a critical step toward ensuring transparency, accountability and parental authority over children’s online experiences. For too long, app stores have operated as digital gatekeepers with little accountability, allowing children to download apps and agree to complex contracts with billion-dollar corporations without a parent even knowing,” said Horn.
Many opponents approached the committee to voice concerns about the constitutionality of the bill, citing First Amendment protections.
John Read spoke on behalf of the Digital Childhood Alliance in support of the bill. He highlighted that the bill’s true intent poses no constitutional issues since it is content-neutral and mainly addresses the contractual obligations between app providers and minors.
“No one is arguing the core of this bill, that children can’t make contracts. That’s longstanding contract law. When your kid hits that terms of service on an app, they’re committed to a contract with legal obligations. That’s what this bill undoes,” said Reed.
Rep. Rick Rehm, R-Dothan, asked for specific clarification as to how this bill did not violate First Amendment rights as many opponents had claimed.
“Because this is contract-focused and every app that a minor tries to download, they get to download if the parent’s consent and they don’t get to download if the parent doesn’t consent. The state’s not making any content choices, any speech choices,” said Read. “It’s designed to avoid all the First Amendment issues that have arisen in all those cases about ‘Is this pornographic? Is this inappropriate?’ and I think it does it quite elegantly.”
Justin Hill spoke on behalf of NetChoice, a trade association that advocates for limited government regulation online, to say that it would be more beneficial to educate families about teen safety online.
Rep. Tracy Estes, R-Winfield, noted that parents opting to educate themselves are already involved with their children’s digital presence and not the parents that the bill hopes to assist.
“If educational efforts were enough, I could sit down with my children once, twice, maybe three times, and they’d get it and we’d be done. We know that’s not how children think. That’s why we need parental protections,” said Estes.
