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Texas app store age verification law blocked by federal judge

by danso on 12/23/25, 10:03 PM with 251 comments

• by WarOnPrivacy on 12/23/25, 11:04 PM

  Judge Robert Pitman said that it violates the First Amendment and is "more likely than not - unconstitutional."

      The Act is 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.
  

  We enjoy 1A protections of speech and assembly. When we consider our rights, the productive, default position is that government is told no (when it wants to restrict us).

• by GeekyBear on 12/23/25, 11:27 PM

  > we are concerned that SB2420 impacts the privacy of users by requiring the collection of sensitive, personally identifiable information to download any app, even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores.

  Avoiding the collection of user data in the first place (if it's possible) is exactly the correct approach to user privacy.

• by TimByte on 12/24/25, 10:29 AM

  What also gets glossed over is the privacy tradeoff: to "protect minors," you end up collecting more sensitive data about everyone, including adults downloading trivial apps

• by larusso on 12/24/25, 7:11 AM

  I spend well over a month now on the topic to implement the different half cooked APIs into our apps. The chance that this gets overturned or blocked was high but we had to race anyways. I’m curious what this means for similar legislations in others states line Utah and Louisiana that where planned to get into effect later this year.

  I very much saw the irony that Texas of all regions tried to restrict the Wild West that is the digital App Store landscape. I think something needs to be done but the implementation proposed is not just problematic but also downright technically impossible. Our first implementation simply failed open for all kinds of errors. Reading the AppStore Age Verification APIs (except Apple) they tried to make this an app problem ala: Playstore is not up to date. Show a message to the user yadayadayada… There so many reasons why this call can go wrong. And the apps won’t start blocking all users just because this call failed. Not to speak about the issue that just for Texas we had to implement said call globally. Because the law states that a an account created after 1.1.26 of a Texas “resident” needs these additional checks. Well let’s see what happens next.

• by Palmik on 12/24/25, 7:27 AM

  I wonder why Texas did not start by targeting NSFW / porn apps specifically, like other states.

  I also wonder why smut literature (the best selling category of books on Amazon) seems to get a free pass.

• by jdprgm on 12/24/25, 8:47 PM

  I don't understand why it feels like out of the blue there is suddenly a rampant and somehow worldwide effort left and right to increase censorship, age verification, etc on the internet. Also I don't get why it seems like so few people care in comparison to years ago during the whole SOPA/PIPA thing where there seemed to be widespread and significant vocal opposition.

  On the age verification thing the only reasonable proposition i've heard would be a feature that allows parents to set some setting that gives a device users age or age range for mobiles and tablets. I think this covers a reasonable percentage of use cases if your goal is actually protecting kids and not just using that as deceptive cover to sneak in widespread surveillance laws. A simple setting that says for example this ipad user is 10-13yrs is privacy preserving enough and would not negatively impact adults and because it would be coming from the device itself would actually be harder to get around vs VPN's or spoofing IDs, etc.

  The idea of trying to address all devices in all scenarios is absolutely preposterous in my opinion.

• by ls612 on 12/23/25, 11:09 PM

  The only reason the earlier age verification laws were upheld were because they narrowly targeted porn. This is an entirely unsurprising outcome.

• by FpUser on 12/24/25, 1:02 PM

  I completely agree with the federal judge's rationale and the decision

• by tonyhart7 on 12/23/25, 11:11 PM

  wait, so its not affect apple users ????

  Google just sent me a email today that Google would push forward

• by zkmon on 12/24/25, 9:28 AM

  So, the law seems broken as judges question and interpret a law as unconstitutional. If every judge across the country does this, we can dismantle entire law. Awesome. The power of capitalism and platform monoply is at full display.

• by whatsupdog on 12/24/25, 6:27 AM

  Judicial Authoritarianism.

• by tronicjester on 12/24/25, 5:45 PM

  Not so fast partner, the Supreme Court has upheld as Constitutional, routine and regular administrative requests including documentation to prove age and income. Otherwise, we would have a paper tiger Income Tax.

• by akmarinov on 12/23/25, 11:07 PM

  And i just got a ton of apps updated and ready for it…

  Thanks, Obama

• by senshan on 12/23/25, 11:16 PM

  If the judge finds that apps and books are so equivalent, then letting the apps require age verification should do no harm -- everyone underage or privacy-concerned will simply go to the bookstore or a library. Right?

  Apparently, these are not quite equivalent. Like books and weapons, like books and alcohol, etc.