California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed two controversial age verification bills into law: AB 1709 and SB 1119.
Newsom was quoted as saying that Thursday was “a good day for our children,” but both laws will also impact adults by forcing online services to distinguish between users based on age.
AB 1709 deals with features on social media that are considered addictive, such as personalized feeds and autoplay, and prohibits these for California users under 16.
Before being allowed to use these features, users must be verified under the California Digital Age Assurance Act, or another statutory age-determination method. The Act in turn relies on age-bracket signals from operating systems and app stores, which are based on age or birthdate information provided by users. The law includes data-minimization and sharing restrictions, and does not require passports or face scans from all users.
AB 1709 will in effect mean that children will be able to use social media accounts, but without access to personalized feeds, which is how many people discover new content and information, and is a key component of how these platforms work.
But the law doesn’t only affect children; adults who want to use the covered features must also verify their age. In reality, this means that companies behind the platforms will have to act as arbiters of who can and cannot use what features.
SB 1119, on the other hand, concerns companion chatbots, and raises the age bar to 18. To comply, the law says that operators must either determine the age of users, or apply child protections to all of them.
If a platform chooses the latter route, it must impose default session limits of one continuous hour and two hours per day. To lift these limits, the chatbot provider must have actual knowledge that the user is not a child.
This means that an adult user of a chatbot will be subject to children’s settings unless the provider is made aware that they are not a child. Once again, the onus of deciding who can use what service, and how, falls on the company providing it.
