Letter in Opposition to FL SB 1722, App Store Accountability Act
In OPPOSITION to Senate Bill 1722, the “App Store Accountability Act”
February 3rd, 2026
Majority Leader Boyd, Minority Leader Berman, and members of the Senate,
My name is Josh Withrow, and I am a resident fellow with the Technology and Innovation Policy team at the R Street Institute, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy organization. Our mission at RSI is to engage in research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government in many areas, including the technology and innovation sector. It’s for this reason we have an interest in SB 1722.
SB 1722, dubbed the “App Store Accountability Act,” would mandate that mobile device app stores must verify upon setup whether the device owner is an adult or a minor, and obtain verifiable parental consent for every app download, update, or purchase made by a minor’s account. Although the language of this bill is slightly more technically sound than last year’s HB 931 and SB 1438, most of the basic problems we warned about in those bills remain.
Imposes an Unconstitutionally Broad Restriction on Access to Speech and Content
The predictions that app store age verification would likely be held as an overly broad restraint on access to constitutionally protected speech have thus far been confirmed, as a district court judge quickly enjoined Texas’ very similar bill, SB 2420. Judge Robert Pitman, in his decision, likened app store age verification as “akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book” and declared the law “unconstitutional in the vast majority of its applications.”
This holds with court precedents like Ashcroft v. ACLU that have consistently held that broad attempts to age-gate general-use online platforms (as opposed to narrow constraints on accessing adult content) are unconstitutionally broad under the First Amendment. SB 1722 is identical in all key respects to the Texas law and would almost certainly suffer the same fate in court.
Requires Over-Collection of Sensitive Personal Data
In order to verify the age of their users, app stores are required to sort users into one of four age categories: under 13, 13-15, 16-17, and 18 or older. In order to establish where a customer falls within these categories, the app stores are allowed to use “commercially available methods reasonably designed to ensure accuracy” or whatever methods state regulators sign off on. Even the best available age verification technologies have significant error rates that guarantee some adult users will be forced to provide some sort of documentary evidence to prove they are not a minor.
Adults who wish to set up parent accounts would likely have to verify their adult status via some sort of hard identification, such as a government ID, in order to enable their minors – up to age of 18 – access to their own device. Although SB 1722 requires that only the data that is necessary to prove compliance with the law be kept by the app stores and whatever services they use for age verification, the risk of liability for errors will certainly lead to over-retention of far more sensitive personal data that would be the case otherwise. This is especially true since the bill grants a private right of civil action if the age protections are deemed to have been enforced improperly.
Creates Government Mandates When Private Solutions Already Exist
Increasingly, the major online platform owners are investing heavily to make their parental control tools at the device, browser, and platform levels more accessible and effective. In addition, there has long been a robust market for third-party software that grants parents even more granular control over their children’ s mobile device screen time and online access. The fact that these effective alternatives are easily available to any parent is another reason that broad age verification mandates fail the First Amendment requirement to impose the least-restrictive means of limiting access to objectionable content.
Ultimately, we believe that a better substitute for these government age-verification mandates would be to find ways that the state can help parents understand the power they already possess to keep their kids safe online, and to educate kids and teens about how to responsibly navigate social media and the internet. Florida has already made a strong start by including digital literacy in public school curriculums, and the Federal Trade Commission’s “Protecting Kids Online” campaign demonstrates a way that the state could help parents decide what online protections are most appropriate for their kids.
Thank you for your consideration,
Josh Withrow
Fellow, Technology & Innovation Policy
R Street Institute
jwithrow@rstreet.org