App Stores, Not Apps, Should Shoulder the Burden of Age Verification

When Meta publicly argues for age verification at the app-store level, it’s tempting to see it as Big Tech trying to offload responsibility. But this time, the company has a point perhaps even a compelling one. If Canada is serious about protecting children online, it needs solutions that are effective, scalable, and respectful of privacy. Pushing age verification to Apple’s App Store and Google Play may actually be the most realistic path forward.

Meta Canada’s director of public policy, Rachel Curran, has been making the rounds in Ottawa and in provincial capitals, pitching a simple idea: instead of every platform inventing its own age-gating system, let the stores that deliver all apps confirm whether a user is over or under 18. App developers would simply receive a signal not a birthdate, not an identity document just a yes or no.

This approach is clean. More importantly, it’s consistent. Right now, every app makes up its own rules, leaving parents guessing and teens slipping through the cracks. App stores already ask for a birth date when parents set up a child’s device. They already require parental authorization for purchases. Extending this system to general age verification is not radical it’s practical.

Critics will say Meta is trying to duck accountability, especially in light of long-standing concerns about youth exposure to harmful content on its platforms. But the company isn’t pretending it has solved the problem internally. In fact, Meta has been rolling out parental controls, PG-13 style policies for teen accounts, and even AI-based age-estimation tools. These are steps in the right direction, but they’re piecemeal. They depend heavily on parents and on the honesty of young users neither of which is a reliable bulwark against the digital world’s darker corners.

And let’s be honest: no single platform can fix this system alone. Even the most responsible social network cannot protect a teenager who bypasses its safeguards by downloading an alternative app that has none. If age verification is fragmented, kids will simply migrate to the least restrictive corner of the internet.

Canadians have watched more than 20 U.S. states experiment with app-store-level age regulation. Meta is now telling Ottawa: the model works. Provinces reportedly support the idea but worry about jurisdiction. That’s understandable online safety policy tends to fall between federal cracks and provincial silos. Still, when the issue is national in scope, the response should be too.

This comes at a moment when concerns about youth safety online are accelerating. Last week, a coalition of medical experts and child advocates declared the situation a national emergency. They want the government to revive the shelved Online Harms Act something the Liberals have said they won’t do, but they will introduce new legislation targeting online exploitation and AI-related risks.

The timing matters. AI chatbots have exploded in popularity, and so have fears about what vulnerable children may encounter. The tragic case referenced by Megan Garcia whose 14-year-old son died by suicide after interactions with an AI system underscores the stakes. She has pleaded with policymakers outside the U.S. to act, because pressure from multiple governments is the only way tech giants will move fast enough.

Meta’s proposal is not a silver bullet. But it is a foundation one that could unify age restrictions across thousands of apps and millions of devices, all without harvesting more personal data from Canadian families. For a country trying to modernize its online-safety framework, this is exactly the kind of structural solution that should be on the table.

If Ottawa is willing to rethink its approach to online harms, then it shouldn’t dismiss an idea just because of who’s proposing it. Sometimes, even Big Tech gets it right.