Texas’s H.B. 4901 — now before the legislature — provides a case study in the damage, even the noblest of intentions, if misplaced and badly executed, can inflict. H.B. 4901 would require app stores on devices such as smartphones and tablets to verify the ages of their users. Further, the bill would forbid app stores to allow underage users to download any application without parental consent.
Of course, government must protect children — online and off. However, it must do so in a deft manner, likely to prove effective, without infringing upon constitutional rights. H.B. 4901 cannot meet such a standard. Instead, the bill is likely to fail in its objectives of protecting children, to muck up family life by injecting the government’s judgements into questions on which parents ought to decide, and to violate the First Amendment.
Judges have routinely ruled age-verification mandates to violate the free-speech rights of Americans adults. The Supreme Court’s most consequential judgement on age verification dates to 2004 in Ashcroft v. ACLU. Since that case, in which the High Court ruled against the burdens of mandated age verification, judges in multiple states have halted such mandates almost without fail. Just in 2025, laws in Arkansas, California, Ohio, and Texas have been enjoined or struck down altogether.
Requiring verification would require users of all ages to submit sensitive data — likely by uploading a photo of an ID or submitting to a facial scan — as a prerequisite to consuming and producing constitutionally protected speech online. And besides the basic privacy question — Do you want to upload your face to a big tech company every time you set up an account? — the threat of cybercrime haunts every depository of user data. As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said at a recent oral argument, “There have been hacks of everything.”
H.B. 4901’s supporters will likely say that its provisions equate to an ID check at a bar or tobacco store. However, flashing a driver’s license to a bouncer or a cashier gives rise to few of the privacy risks that attend uploading a copy of one’s ID or a scan of one’s face. Similarly, striking down an Ohio law last week, a federal judge noted that the common defense of enforced age verification merely as a tool of contract law wilts under scrutiny.
Even worse, the particulars of H.B. 4901 ensure that Texans will have to submit still more data. First, the bill would require app stores to categorize in an “age category”: younger than 13 years old, 13–15 years, 16–17 years, and adult. Advocates of app store–level age verification have taken to saying that app stores now collect the necessary data to confirm users’ ages without collecting any more, a falsity that seems to have sprung at least in part from misinterpretations of tech companies’ privacy policies. But even were it true that app stores can analyze user behavior to distinguish adults from children, they cannot divide users into these narrow age categories with anything near the certainty needed to satisfy the requirements of the law. To dodge liability, therefore, app stores would extract from users whatever sensitive data they require to ensure perfect knowledge of every user’s age.
H.B. 4901’s provision that parents assent each time a minor attempts to download an application would require even more data gathering. App stores would find themselves enjoined to collect whatever information they might need to establish that the person purporting to be the underage user’s parent is, in fact, that user’s parent. This seems likely to necessitate disclosures regarding not just the user’s and the parent’s ages but their identities.
Enterprising minors could easily skirt the bill’s narrow and rigid framework to find the online content they seek. Other, better tools than the ones offered by H.B. 4901 exist for the protection of minors online. Parents can employ myriad software tools on most devices and platforms — from the network to the device to the platform level — to monitor and guide their children’s digital lives. The problem with these tools is not their efficacy, but parents’ ignorance of them and their workings. To that end, state lawmakers should embark on educational campaigns to ensure parents and families understand precisely how to tailor the digital world in their children’s best interest. Where tried — as in Florida — this approach has done great good. Parents should not be told that their parenting is unneeded, that the government has done what must be done to protect their children; they receive the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools to involve themselves actively in shaping the contours of their children’s digital lives.
Parents, not the government, must bear the responsibility of raising children. When the government intrudes on the family domain, unforeseen ills often ensue. Texas’s lawmaker should work to strengthen families and support parental authority, not preempt it.
David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
