Senate Bill 372 Brings Small-Town Values to the Digital World

In my rural district, which covers northeast Kansas, families look out for one another and protect their kids at all costs. In our small towns, Kansans trust that public schools will not open their doors to child predators, banks will not make sharky loans to children, and corner stores will not sell unaccompanied minors alcohol, tobacco, or other age-restricted products. 

Unfortunately, Kansas parents cannot count on the same protections for their kids online. 

Today’s digital world works less like a small town and more like the Wild West. The fabric of trust, accountability, and shared values that ties Kansans together is nowhere to be found on our kids’ phones and tablets – least of all on the app store marketplaces that deliver millions of poorly regulated platforms straight to our kids’ home screens.

In just a few taps, app stores allow kids to download improperly age-rated platforms, including social media apps, violent video games, AI chatbots, and anonymous messaging tools, all of which can become breeding grounds for blackmailers and child predators. When kids agree to download or purchase these platforms, they also consent to opaque terms of service conditions that allow developers to comb through their contacts, search history, and camera roll and constitute binding contracts. At no point in the process is a parent notified or asked to consent. 

As a father, I find this lack of default, automatic protection entirely unacceptable. Parents deserve better tools to supervise kids online. And children deserve stronger safeguards. That is why I support Senate Bill 372, the App Store Accountability Act. 

Senate Bill 372 would restore trust, order, and transparency to the app store overnight. Just like teachers require a signed permission slip for a student to participate in a field trip, Senate Bill 372 would require informed parental consent for all minors’ app downloads and purchases. This precautionary step has potential to stop harm in its tracks, empowering parents to block kids’ access to risky apps that open the door to cyberbullying, mature content, sextortion, and more before they are ever installed. 

How it works in practice is simple. Senate Bill 372 would require app stores to use their existing age-verification mechanisms as the foundation for obtaining parental approval. During account set-up, app stores would link minor and parent accounts, providing parents with a secure and familiar system to manage the platforms available on their kids’ devices without needing to repeatedly share age information on an app-by-app basis. 

Kansans agree this bill is necessary. Recent polling shows overwhelming bipartisan support for Senate Bill 372’s core premise: 81% of Kansans, including 82% of parents, support requiring app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps.

The reason behind this near-unanimous support is simple. App stores serve as the primary gateways to the digital world, and parents agree that is where meaningful safeguards must begin. Parental consent, truth in advertising, contracting fairness, and age-gating are common-sense safety guardrails that ought to be built-in to app stores, just as they are in the real world. 

Kansas parents are tired of waiting for Washington to deliver the digital protections our kids urgently need. It’s time we follow in the footsteps of Utah, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama and pass the App Store Accountability Act in Topeka. 

I was proud to vote with my Senate colleagues to advance Senate Bill 372 to the Kansas House of Representatives where it now awaits a hearing in the Committee on Federal and State Affairs. I urge my fellow state lawmakers to act without delay and pass this bill to protect future generations from exploitation and the harms of an unaccountable digital marketplace.