Illinois Governor Signs Age-Appropriate Design Code into Law

On Friday, Governor JB Pritzker signed into law the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, a significant piece of legislation that regulates harmful platform design for minors, such as addictive feeds and overnight push notifications. 

EPIC applauds Gov. Pritzker and all of the Illinois lawmakers who recognized the importance of age-appropriate platform design regulation and moved this law forward. EPIC would also like to thank all of our coalition partners, particularly Design It For Us, for their efforts advocating for the CSMSA. 

The law requires strong default privacy settings for minors and digital, device-level age assurance to ensure that minors benefit from the law’s protections. Devices must provide an interface at account setup for the primary user of the device to self-report their birth date or age. Then, after receiving consent from the user, the device can share that age-range signal with online platforms or companies to provide age-appropriate safeguards and privacy protections for minors.    

Many of the provisions in the CSMSA are similar to the model bill that EPIC released earlier this year. The EPIC  Model Age-Appropriate Design Code protects kids online by prohibiting addictive design features for minors, giving them control over their privacy and preventing companies from designing products to promote compulsive use. In drafting the model bill and providing feedback on CSMSA, EPIC relied on its deep privacy knowledge, significant state policy experience, and expertise in  speech-protective platform regulation.