- The Texas App Store Accountability App was hit by two lawsuits
- Plaintiffs argue that the law violates the First Amendment
- Texas’ age verification law is set to go into effect on January 1, 2026
A journalism student, a high school debater, a student organization and a consortium of Big Tech giants walk into a room. No, this is not the beginning of a joke – they are all trying to prevent the Texas new age verification law from going into effect.
The Texas App Store Accountability Act, which is set to be enforced on January 1, 2026, will require official app stores to perform mandatory age checks on everyone in the state before allowing them to download mobile applications.
Teenagers would also be banned from downloading any app or make an in-app purchase without parental consent. In return, parents must verify their identity to consent to each download or purchase.
According to the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), these requirements violate the First Amendment “by restricting app stores from offering legal content, preventing users from viewing that content, and forcing app developers to talk about their offerings in a way that pleases the state.”
Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) agrees with Big Tech on this and filed a similar lawsuit. “Students have just as much right to access information as adults, and this law denies them access,” said Cameron Samuels, co-founder and CEO of SEAT.
The Texas law is one of many age verification laws being enforced across the United States in the name of children’s online safety. While mandatory age checks have pushed internet users to turn to the best VPN apps to avoid sharing their sensitive details, it’s not yet clear whether using a VPN could be a viable option for Texans.
How Texas Age Verification Rules May Affect Citizens
The CCIA, which represents the likes of Apple, Google and Amazon, has described the proposed rules as a “misleading attempt to protect minors” that seeks to go a step further than today’s parental control systems by requiring everyone (not just minors) to prove their age before they can do anything in the app stores.
Users can do so by uploading a valid form of government-issued identification to the platform. But building such a database of sensitive details raises data privacy and security concerns, experts warn, as it could become a target for hacking or abuse.
However, that is not all. “The Texas App Store Accountability Act imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps,” the CCIA warns in its lawsuit.
That’s because the law goes far beyond adult-only social media apps or websites, which are the target of most age verification laws in the United States. It will age-restrict all sorts of applications, including educational, news and creative apps like Wikipedia, Coursera, Spotify and The New York Times, potentially inhibiting the ability of minors to learn, communicate and express themselves.
Still, “The First Amendment does not allow the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity. The constitution also prohibits restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children,” says Ambika Kumar, a lawyer for student organization SEAT.
“This law imposes a system of prior restraint on protected expression that is presumed to be unconstitutional,” she added.
Can a VPN help?
As mandatory age verification spreads across the internet, people in the US and abroad are using VPN apps to bypass these checks.
Whether they’re doing it to protect their most sensitive personal data, or whether they’re minors wanting to evade scrutiny, it’s hard to know for sure – most likely it’s a mix of both.
What’s important to know here is that a virtual private network (VPN) can spoof a user’s IP address to make them look like they’re browsing the internet from a completely different location in no time.
As we’ve seen during the brief US TikTok ban, a VPN may not be a quick fix when restrictions are imposed at the App Store level. This will depend on how the restrictions will ultimately be implemented.
At that point, however, the question also remains whether complaints will manage to strike down Texas’ new age verification requirements before they officially take effect.
