In 2025, Utah became the first state to pass an app store age-verification and parental consent law, the App Store Accountability Act. The law imposes age-verification and parental-consent obligations on app stores and developers with the intention of keeping children safe online.
Under Utah’s amended law, when a user creates an account, app stores must determine the user’s age, then developers must use that information to determine whether the user may download a particular app. Simply relying on children to honestly type a birthday doesn’t count; distributors are responsible for making sure children aren’t getting unrestricted access to inappropriate content. Second, stores and developers must get parental consent before minors download apps or make in-app purchases. This gives parents a meaningful opportunity to approve or decline what their children access. Utah’s app store law goes into effect in 2027.
While no silver bullet exists for completely blocking harmful content from children’s access, this law reflects an important shift in thinking: protecting children online cannot fall solely on parents. The companies that make, distribute, or profit from digital products must share that responsibility.
This shared responsibility becomes increasingly important in a world saturated with sexual media—pornographic images and videos across social media platforms, AI apps that make people appear nude in images or provide sexual companions, and smartphones that make it all instantly accessible. Children today are growing up in a world where smartphones, social media, and countless apps are just part of life. But those very tools kids use for homework, entertainment, and friendships can also place pornography just a few taps away. Expecting parents to shoulder that burden alone is unrealistic.
A research review from the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) details just how severe the problem of underage access to pornography is. Far from being a rare occurrence, pornography exposure has become a common part of growing up, and use is now widespread among children and teens. Most children encounter pornography before they turn 18, and many are exposed during late elementary or middle school—between the ages of 10 and 14. By age 13, half of boys report intentionally seeking out pornography, with girls following only a few years later.
Expecting parents to shoulder that burden alone is unrealistic.
As a result, pornography has become an unintended and unhealthy form of sex education for many children—and it teaches lessons no parent would choose. According to the Wheatley/IFS review, many children are regularly accessing pornography that depicts violence, coercion, incest, and the sexual exploitation of minors as normal or pleasurable. One large analysis found physical aggression in roughly four in ten scenes of more than 7,000 popular videos, while another concluded that unlawful and exploitative material is easily accessible on mainstream pornography websites.
What does repeated exposure to this kind of content teach children about intimacy, consent, and healthy relationships? Even when pornography doesn’t fall into the extreme categories mentioned above, exposure can distort children’s healthy development. Research suggests pornography can shape how adolescents think, behave, and relate to others. It’s linked to riskier sexual behaviors, unhealthier attitudes about sex, higher sexual aggression, greater risk of compulsive pornography use later on, and poorer mental health outcomes.
Perhaps most concerning, these effects don’t necessarily end with adolescence. The consequences of early pornography use can continue, undermining young people’s ability to build the stable relationships, marriages, and families that are closely linked with personal and societal well-being.
While pornography is a major risk children can face online, it’s far from the only one. Platforms with messaging functions—think social media, dating apps, or online gaming—can give adult strangers a direct line to vulnerable children. This means that, without factors like age verification and parental consent as barriers, bad actors can target children from behind closed doors and lead a conversation into coercion, abuse, and other serious harm.
These contacts are quite prevalent. In 2025 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 1.4 million reports concerning online enticement, including more than 80,000 involving sextortion—the threatening of others into sending explicit images online. In this report from Thorn, more than one in five kids surveyed said they’d had an online sexual interaction with someone believed to be an adult, and 54% of kids reported that online grooming is a common experience for kids their age.
A majority of kids believe that sexual encounters with adults online are a common experience. This is a sobering fact. Dozens and dozens of apps offer communication features, so when child safety isn’t prioritized, ill-meaning strangers suddenly have access to a population they shouldn’t. Parents can’t monitor each click and each conversation, so it’s vital that tech companies step up and help.
Of course, tech providers can’t shield children from every potentially dangerous online experience, so that’s why allowing parents to be more involved in their children’s online activities provides a protective factor. Even after the app store law goes into effect, there may still be harmful algorithms that lead to poor body image or self-harm issues. There may still be cyberbullying, addictive features, and privacy concerns. And there may still be characteristics of the online world that are inherently exploitative of children.
But requiring app stores and developers to obtain parental consent before minors get involved in this world puts control in parents’ hands. The worry of children downloading an app or making an account behind their parents’ backs lessens, and parents can be involved in deciding which platforms do or don’t have access to their children.
Parents remain children’s first and most important line of defense.
Utah’s app store law is a step toward protecting children from those risks because it recognizes this truth: the companies that build, distribute, and profit from digital products need to prioritize children’s safety too.
But it is only a step. Utah, the nation, and lawmakers everywhere should pursue additional policies that share responsibility for protecting children online and put children’s online well-being ahead of corporate profit and technological convenience. Continued focus on practices like age verification, parental involvement, and industry transparency can create valuable safeguards against the devastating influence of pornography and other developmentally damaging online content.
If we’re serious about protecting children online, we have to consider all the influences on children’s digital experiences. Technology companies certainly play a significant role, and they should share responsibility for protecting children.
