Op-Ed: Time to Protect Kids Online – Our members run businesses across the Chicagoland area. They manage supply chains, payroll, customer relationships, and community partnerships. They coach youth basketball teams, serve on school councils, and show up for neighborhood events. And like parents everywhere, they’re trying to figure out how to keep their children safe in a digital world that changes faster than any of us can track.When we gather at chamber events, conversations often drift from business challenges to parenting ones. The question we hear most often isn’t about marketing strategies or financing, it’s “how do you handle your kids and their phones?”
These are the most engaged parents I know, but even they are getting overwhelmed by the challenge of keeping tabs on their kids’ technology habits. They are entrepreneurs working twelve-hour days who simply cannot spend additional time navigating unique settings and verification processes of different apps. They need practical tools they can manage from their own phones, not a maze of settings menus on every app to master. The App Store Accountability Act, currently before Congress, offers exactly what our members, and parents everywhere, are asking for: a simple notification system that works through the app store itself. When a child wants to download an app, their parent gets a popup notification on their own phone, and with a click, they can approve or deny the request. Users verify their ages once when the phone is set up, and that’s it. Parents stay informed without becoming full-time surveillance officers.
Compare that to the Parents Over Platforms Act, which pushes age verification down to individual apps and makes matters more complicated. Under that approach, children and parents would potentially verify age across many different platforms. Certain apps would need to collect enough data to determine a user’s age, which could mean biometric scanning, uploading government IDs, or essentially performing background checks. For families already navigating complicated lives, this creates more confusion, not less. But the privacy question matters just as much as convenience, maybe more. Every time a child verifies their age with an individual app, that company collects personal data. Each data collection point becomes a potential target for breaches. And, every company with information about minors becomes another entity that might sell, share, or mishandle that data. The App Store Accountability Act keeps children’s data in one place: the app store. Individual apps receive only confirmation that parental consent was obtained. Not a facial scan or uploaded identification. They never need to collect extensive personal data about minors. That’s not just more convenient, it’s fundamentally safer.
We understand that the best systems are the ones people will actually use. A parent working two jobs isn’t going to navigate consent frameworks across thirty different apps. But they will respond to a single notification asking whether their child can download something new. Illinois families need digital safety legislation that respects both their time and their privacy. Congress should pass the App Store Accountability Act because it delivers what parents actually need: visibility into their children’s digital lives without creating new burdens or new risks. We urge our congressional delegation to support this parent-approved approach.
Op-Ed: Time to Protect Kids Online
