Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Utah's new child protection laws require app stores to verify user age.
- The laws mandate parental consent for minors' app downloads and in-app purchases.
- Google and Apple oppose, citing privacy risks; other states may follow Utah's lead.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah reasserted its place at the tip of the spear in the battle against Big Tech this legislative session with a pair of pioneering bills aimed at protecting parental consent and user data.
Gov. Spencer Cox signed the state's first-in-the-nation App Store Accountability Act into law on Wednesday and praised the state's similarly unprecedented Data Sharing Amendments as a game changer.
Critics of the proposals predict they will end up in the same place as Utah's earlier efforts in 2023 and 2024 to mandate social media safety features for minors which courts have paused out of constitutional concerns.
Advocates argue that the Beehive State's latest attempt to rein in software giants is lawsuit-proof because of its focus on contracts instead of content. The new laws, they say, will give Utahns important tools to prevent exploitation at the hands of companies that profit from private information and unhealthy screen time.
Parent permission on app stores
SB142, App Store Accountability Act, mirrors legislation introduced by Utah Sen. Mike Lee at the federal level that was proposed by a coalition of child protection groups led by Utahn Melissa McKay.
The new law will require app stores to verify whether a user is an adult, using the same information required to set up an app store account. Minor accounts must be affiliated with a parent account and will be placed in one of three age categories: child (under 13), younger teenager (13-16) or older teenager (16-18).
App stores will be required to obtain verifiable parental consent if a minor attempts to download an app or make an in-app purchase. The consent process must inform parents of the app's age rating and a description of how the app will use and protect their child's information.
"This was kind of a radical new concept," McKay said in an interview with the Deseret News. "It took us a long time to realize it doesn't matter what we do as a coalition ... these companies aren't fixing themselves."
Under the new law, app developers will be required to verify a user's age category and parental consent status with app stores once a year or whenever the app's terms of use agreement is updated.
The law also creates a new right of action for parents of harmed minors to sue app stores or developers if they violate these provisions by enforcing contracts against minors without parental consent, by misrepresenting the app when asking for consent or by sharing personal age verification data inappropriately.
"While we need to embrace technology as part of our future and as something important in our society, we also need to protect children," said Aimee Winder Newton, director of Utah's Office of Families, in an interview with the Deseret News. "And that's what's so great about Utah, is we recognize that protecting children is No. 1."
Pushback from Google and Apple
During the 2025 legislative session, the bill received the support of app developers like Meta, Snap Inc., and X, who were happy to see the responsibility for verifying identity moved to one central location and called for other states to implement Utah's solution.
"Parents want a one-stop-shop to oversee and approve the many apps their teens want to download," the three companies said in a joint statement. "This approach spares users from repeatedly submitting personal information to countless individual apps and online services."
But the country's main app store companies, Apple and Google, were strongly against the bill and put forward their own proposals that would have made age verification between stores and developers optional.
In a blog post following the bill's passage, Google's public policy director, Kareem Ghanem, said the bill introduced new privacy risks for minors by informing every developer of users' ages without parents' permission.
Meanwhile, Apple also suggested that Utah's law forced app stores to unnecessarily collect and distribute "sensitive personally identifying information."
Caden Rosenbaum, a senior policy analyst at the Utah-based Libertas Institute, told the Deseret News that the bill simply recodified current contract law while potentially compromising internet anonymity and expanding government interference in the private sector and in the home.
"In an ideal world, the government would not be in the business of parenting. I think that is the fundamental disagreement here," Rosenbaum said. "There are relevant issues that we need to discuss, and we shouldn't be just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks when it comes to the way that we do it."
While Rosenbaum questioned the bill's ability to survive constitutional scrutiny, the sponsor of the legislation, state Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, said he doesn't expect the law to receive the same fate as the state's previous attempts to regulate minors' experience on social media.
Unlike those policies, SB142 is difficult to attack on First Amendment grounds, Weiler said. But the bill was given a delayed implementation date of May 6, 2026, to give the social media companies "time to react."
Several other states, including Texas, are likely to pass legislation based on Utah's this year and could receive legal challenges first because of earlier implementation dates.
