For the uninformed, SB 2420 is a bill that just recently passed in Texan Law that wants to protect children from downloading certain Adult Apps from App Stores.
Here is a TL;DR of what the bill does. But don't trust me with this infomation! Read the bill yourself before forming your own opinion.
SB 2420 will require App Stores Doing Business in Texas, United States, Earth, Solar System to verify someone's age before allowing the person to download an age restricted App.
When App Stores take your infomation for verification, They are required NOT to store your infomation permanently. But rather are required to delete it after verifying your age.
If App Stores fail to delete this infomation, this Violation will be considered a deceptive trade practice with the law providing additional legal remedies for this. In fact, most of the bill covers privacy protections for the users of these App Stores at levels not seen before.
Now, here are a few reasons why this may or may not be a privacy concern for you.
1: Companies will be forced to collect less infomation about you.
With this law in place, companies are now responsible for not keeping your data long term.
These big tech companies have been doing everything to not keep your personal sensitive infomation a secret. But now there will be heavier consequences for doing this.
But.
2: we cannot trust tech companies.
No one can trust them.
They are often not our friend.
Even our friends have now become our enemies.
No one wants to give Tech Companies the ability to link your real life identity to your account being used to download apps on the app store. And we cannot verify that these companies are doing the right thing without becoming an employee at these companies and looking deep into this.
And even if someone releases an open source solution to this, we cannot verify that this verification system is the same one being used everywhere without running our own instance ourselves.
So the big question is, is what will FOSS Repositories do about this? What will they do so that they are compliant with the law without violating user privacy?
Will they purposely violate the law?
Will they even operate in Texas at all?
Or will they decided to remove all adult apps so that they don't have to implement the law in the first place?
I would love to know what you think about this. Because your opinion matters.
-Chef K