Your Face or Your ID: Texas Wants Both Before You Download a Weather App

In Texas right now, before you can download a weather app — just a weather app — the law says you may have to prove how old you are. Not a porn site. Not a gambling app. A calculator. A way to check tomorrow's forecast. And to prove your age, you might hand over your government I.D. — or let a camera scan your face and guess.

If you've ever downloaded an app — any app — this

If you've ever downloaded an app — any app — this story is about you. Because a Texas law called S.B. twenty-four-twenty wants app stores to check the age of everyone, and get a parent's permission before a kid downloads anything at all. A federal appeals court let that law take effect. Now it's racing toward the Supreme Court. Justice Samuel Alito asked Texas officials to respond by a hard deadline — four p.m. on 06/22. So the real question underneath all of this — should a state use a machine's guess about your face as the gatekeeper to your phone?

Let's start with what makes this law different. Other states have gone after specific content — adult sites, gambling. This one's broader. Under the Texas law, the age check happens at the app store itself. That means before you download the Wall Street Journal, or a flashlight app, the store wants to know how old you are. Every download becomes a checkpoint.

Now — how do these systems actually figure out your age? They make a guess. Either a camera looks at your face and estimates, or the system studies your activity. Every one of these methods is a guess based on your face or your behavior. And here's where it gets uncomfortable. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these face-scanning tools are less accurate for people who are Black, Asian, Indigenous, or Southeast Asian. The systems often look at those adults and decide they're under eighteen. So a grown woman could get locked out of an app — because an algorithm misread her face. That's not a small bug. That's a real person blocked from something she has every legal right to use.

There's a second problem most people don't think about

There's a second problem most people don't think about. To prove your age, you're handing over your most sensitive information — your face, your driver's license, your I.D. Researchers in a peer-reviewed study warn that all that data piles up into a tempting target for hackers. A database full of faces and government I.D.s? That's a goldmine for criminals. So the tool meant to protect kids could quietly create a brand-new place for your identity to get stolen.

And people clearly don't trust it. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University surveyed users about age verification. Most people were uncomfortable with every method — except simply clicking a box. When asked to upload a real government I.D., fewer than a third actually finished. Most people started — and walked away.

Now, this isn't one-sided. Since twenty twenty-three, eighteen other states have passed nearly identical laws — with support from both parties. Parents want guardrails. That demand is real. Groups like Common Sense Media argue that if we call everything online "speech," then we can never build any real protections for kids. That's a fair point, and it's why smart people genuinely disagree here.