Melissa McKay Protects Kids, Restores Parents’ Rights Through ‘App Store Accountability Act’
Digital safety advocate Melissa McKay has spent nearly a decade trying to get parents the information and tools they need to protect their children online.
Her latest creation, the App Store Accountability Act, tackles obstacles to parental authority at the app store level. The model legislation, which Texas, Louisiana and Utah have passed, requires app stores to:
- Verify the ages of their consumers.
- Obtain parental consent before minors download apps, make in-app purchases and sign terms of service contracts.
- Provide a transparent age rating system and accurate ratings for all available apps.
“[Google and Apple] aren’t providing parents with any of the tools they need to protect their kids,” McKay, who created and leads the Digital Childhood Institute, told the Daily Citizen. “In fact, they’re lying to them.”
“Even the most perfect parents cannot do their job it they’re being deceived.”
McKay’s advocacy career began in 2017, when the mother of five noticed trusted adults encouraging her children to join Instagram.
“Their school was asking them to get on Instagram for sports communication,” she recalled. “Our church was asking them to get on Instagram to talk about Jesus Christ.”
So, when McKay read a Forbes article alleging Instagram was chalk-full of pornography, she was understandably skeptical. Still, the conscientious mother decided to do her due diligence.
Sure enough. McKay found a simple search for “#girl” led to all kinds of pornography. A similar search on Snapchat, which the Apple App Store rated appropriate for 12-year-olds, led to more rotten content.
McKay quickly learned the problem was widespread. Apple and Google each use their own app-rating system. Both systems largely allow app developers — the people who create the apps — to control their own ratings.
“The biggest problem with app stores is they have tilted the incentive system toward dishonesty.” McKay explains. “Developers have no incentive to rate their systems accurately [because] they don’t want to limit their audiences.”
Apple’s app rating system requires app developers fill out a deliberately vague form. An app with sexual content, for instance, can still be rated appropriate for teens if the developer claims the app’s sexual content appears “infrequently,” McKay explains.
Each form receives about ten minutes of human review, on average, according to McKay. Different reviewers can assign apps wildly different ratings from the same form.
“The Apple system is a complete joke,” McKay told us. “[But] the Google system is worse.”
The Google Play Store requires app developers to fill out a two-minute form. No human ever reviews the answers.
“That’s why 90% of the apps on the Google Play Store are rated safe for everybody,” she explained.
Parents can’t make educated decisions about what their children do online if age ratings on apps are deceptive. That’s why the App Store Accountability Act requires accurate and transparent age ratings.
“The rating is one of the only thin pieces of tissue paper between the kids and exploitation,” McKay emphasizes. Parents must be confident ratings are accurate.
The act holds app stores and developers accountable for ensuring apps are rated correctly. Deceptive age ratings can be prosecuted under deceptive advertising laws.
Though deceptive advertising laws aren’t often applied to online products, Melissa observes, they should carry the same legal and cultural weight online as they do for physical products.
“Imagine walking into a G-rated movie that’s full of sex scenes!” she says, for example. “Everyone would sue!”
The second component of the App Store Accountability Act is age verification. The act would require phone manufacturers like Apple or Google to verify users’ ages, then prevent them from downloading age-inappropriate apps without parents’ permission.
Apple and Google could further share users’ age with app developers, when necessary.
McKay argues requiring age-verification at the app store level is not only more efficient, but more private, than other solutions. Phone manufacturers already have access to users’ identifying information. It makes more sense to require manufacturers use the data they already have to verify users’ ages rather than give fifty different apps personal information.
Further, requiring age-verification at the app store would shield kids from harm at one of the highest levels of engagement — before they can download a dangerous or inappropriate app.
The third component of the App Store Accountability Act is parental consent. The act prevents app stores and app developers from doing business with minors without a parent’s permission.
“Our premise is kids have never been able to agree to contracts or sign contracts,” McKay explains. But, up until January, she tells the Daily Citizen, Apple and Google were sending kids emails explaining how to get around parental controls.
This behavior would not be acceptable under the App Store Accountability Act. Instead, app stores would be required to obtain parental consent before allowing a minor to download apps, make in-app purchases or sign terms or service contracts.
Stores would also have to notify parents if one of their child’s apps monetizes a new feature, changes the kinds of user data it collects or how it collects it, changes its age rating, or changes its description.
McKay defends parents’ rights as a mom who knows how impossible it is to protect kids online with imperfect information. So often, however, Big Tech companies blame the harm they cause on parents themselves.
But we never blame parents for harm caused by faulty technology in other situations, she argues. So why would we blame parents for the harms of Big Tech companies?
She expounds:
That’s not to say parents have no responsibility to their children — quite the opposite. McKay encourages parents to delay getting personal technology for their children as long as possible.
“As long as [the app stores] are the wild west, parents will not win,” she says. “There are so many cards stacked against you.”
She continued:
McKay and her team plan to help motivated parents and citizens introduce the App Store Accountability Act in as many states as possible this year.
Please join the Daily Citizen in praying over Melissa and supporting her in the success of this legislation!
Additional Articles and Resources
Texas Can Enforces App Store Accountability Act — For Now
