On October 22, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier unveiled the Safe Screens Act at Polk State College in Winter Haven, alongside Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. It is a legislative proposal that would put age verification into three layers of the phone. App stores, mainly Apple's App Store and Google Play, would have to determine every user's age, link minors to a parent's account and get explicit parental consent before a minor downloads or buys any app. Device operating systems would apply age-appropriate restrictions based on verified age. AI chatbot operators would have to determine the age of every account holder before giving access.

Why It Matters

State age-verification fights have focused on porn sites, which [Aylo has answered by geo-blocking about half the country](/stories/utah-sb73-vpn-law-enforcement-paused). Florida's plan targets the layer below the sites. If the OS and app store establish age, every adult app on the device inherits that signal, along with the privacy risks of a central age record. It also follows the federal [H.R. 8250 OS-verification bill](/stories/os-age-verification-bill-hr8250) and Texas/Utah app-store laws. A blanket ban on companionship features and sexual content for minors would make age assurance a basic requirement for every AI-companion app operating in Florida. Watch for a sponsor, Apple and Google's response, and whether other attorneys general adopt the model.

The chatbot section is the most relevant to the intimacy-tech sector. For minors, the proposal would bar chatbots from offering features that simulate companionship through personification or emotional engagement, offering unsupervised therapy, delivering sexual content, suggesting the bot is a real person, or encouraging isolation from trusted adults. Teen social accounts (ages 14–17) would face mandatory "quiet mode" from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on school days, a two-hour daily cap, hidden like counts, and no autoplay or infinite scroll by default. Violations would count as unfair practices under Florida Statutes §501.1736, with penalties of up to $50,000 per violation. Age checks must use "commercially reasonable, privacy-protective methods," but the proposal does not name any technique.

It is not law yet. TechTimes reports the proposal has no legislative sponsor, and Florida's 2027 session doesn't begin until March 2. The timing is deliberate: it came days after the Eleventh Circuit's October 14 ruling that Florida's HB 3 social-media law is likely constitutional. Critics say that verifying minors at the operating-system level means checking the age of every adult smartphone user, which turns a child-protection measure into universal identity infrastructure.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-27

Initial entry — story first created.