EFF Warns California A.B. 1043 Internet Age Gates Will Create Censorship Trap and Hurt Open Source

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a detailed analysis warning that California's A.B. 1043, which requires operating systems and app stores to create age bracketing systems, will effectively outsource censorship to developers and disproportionately harm small and open-source software creators.

The Problem

A.B. 1043 requires all operating systems and app stores to create age bracketing systems that segment users by age. Users must provide their birth date to be placed in an age bracket. The law treats the age bracket signal as giving applications actual knowledge of users' ages, which could trigger liability under California's Age-Appropriate Design Code.

The Censorship Trap

The result is what EFF calls a 'recipe for censorship': developers will interpret the law as requiring them to exclude users who say they are minors, or those who don't fit acceptable age brackets. But minors have a First Amendment right to access the vast majority of apps and services. California has essentially outsourced censorship to developers, who are likely to over-censor.

Harm to Open Source

The law's burdens fall particularly hard on small and open-source developers:

• No resources to implement complex age verification systems
• Risk of being found non-compliant and pushed out of markets
• Forced to reach for imperfect solutions
• Effectively limits software choices at a time when computational power is concentrating in few hands

Other Issues

• The one-size-fits-all approach assumes the internet begins and ends with dominant tech companies
• Doesn't account for shared devices (common in low-income households)
• Imagines technology that does not currently exist
• Often easy to circumvent while exposing consumers to real data breach risk

Source: EFF Deeplinks