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As Europe cracks down on online content for minors, Google argues Meta’s solution would create new dangers instead of solving old ones.
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American tech heavyweight Google on Friday reiterated its opposition to verifying the age of a device’s user through the app stores built into operating systems, calling a proposal from Facebook and Instagram parent Meta “ineffective”.
Age restrictions and the European regulatory push
Limiting access to age-restricted content online is a live issue in Europe, with France battling pornography sites over its newly-introduced requirement that they check users’ ages.
Paris is also one of several capitals pressing Brussels to introduce Europe-wide regulations cutting off access to social networks for under-15s over concerns including addiction, cyberbullying and hate speech.
Basing age verification on details from a device’s app store “would require the sharing of granular age band data with millions of developers… who don’t need it”, such as producers of uncontroversial apps like flashlights, Google wrote in a blog post.
Risk to children
“We have strong concerns about the risks this ‘solution’ would pose to children,” it added.
The search giant’s Play Store is a part of the Android operating system, by far the most widely-used around the globe.
Google said that using app store data to verify ages would also leave major ways people access content online unprotected for the underage, such as desktop computers or shared family devices.
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Apple — whose own App Store is loaded on every device running its iOS operating system, such as iPhones and iPads — has also pushed back against Meta’s proposal.
The back and forth
“The right place to address the dangers of age-restricted content online is the limited set of websites and apps that host that content,” the iPhone maker said in a February document.
“Implementing age verification at the operating system or app store level will help ensure that we create an ecosystem that’s safe for teens,” the Facebook owner’s safety chief Antigone Davis told Euronews in February.
Meta has since launched a campaign for European regulation to require the measure.
Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force last year, says it is up to platforms like Meta’s to verify the age of their users — not providers of operating systems or app stores.
Google said that changing to the latter system — which has also been pushed by Pornhub parent company Aylo — would mean “reengineering the protocols that have defined the decentralized web in ways that are hard to fully predict”.
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