Law / United States / 
South Carolina
South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code, general applicability and minor-protective design duties
S.C. Code Ann. secs. 39-80-10 et seq. (Act No. 96 of 2026, H. 3431)
In force since , under challenge in court.
A data subject rights rule binding private bodies.
- How the hook was established
- express
- What makes it apply
- Operator establishment
- Audit expectation
- periodic
- Who audits it
- Independent third party
- Where the report goes
- Filed with regulator, Published
- Court action
A suit challenging this law is pending. No court has blocked it. Premium data
What it requires
- Determine whether your online service is reasonably likely to be accessed by a minor under 18 before relying on any Age-Appropriate Design Code exemption.
- Apply default privacy settings and limit profiling, targeted advertising, and precise-geolocation collection for a known minor user, and provide parental controls.
- Cite S.C. Code Ann. Chapter 80 of Title 39 or Act No. 96 of 2026 (H. 3431) directly; H. 3402, a similarly named but different and unenacted bill, is not this law.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Who enforces it
Settledness
NetChoice, LLC v. Wilson, No. 3:26-cv-00543 (D.S.C.), challenges the Act, and NetChoice moved for a preliminary injunction on .
- As of
- Under challenge
- Yes
- Open questions
- Does an age that an advertising or analytics partner attributes to a user count among the "information and inferences known to the covered online service" under Section 39-80-10(7), when the service itself never receives that age?
- Which of the harms listed in Section 39-80-20(A) fall within the limit in Section 39-80-20(B) to "those for which liability is permitted under 47 U.S.C Section 230"?
What it makes you log
Who may demand the log
Regulator, Public
Logging duty
Chapter 80 has no clause that names a log, register or retained file. Its annual report to the Attorney General (39-80-70(A)) must give an accounting of the total number and types of reports of harm to minors that the service received under 39-80-60(A) and how they were handled, and must describe the service's handling of data access, deletion and correction requests; a count of that kind cannot be produced without a kept tally, so the duty is treated as an implied record. The chapter sets no retention period for it. The report is prepared by an independent third-party auditor, the service must give the auditor full and complete cooperation and access to information and operations (39-80-70(C)), and the report is submitted to the Attorney General, who posts it publicly; the auditor's access is to the service's information and operations, not to a named record, so it adds no access value. The reach is the definition of a covered online service as one that conducts business in this State and is reasonably likely to be accessed by minors (39-80-10(4)(a)); the chapter's duties run toward a user located in South Carolina (39-80-10(20)), which is the location of the protected person and is left out of the hook values because one pin cannot carry both clauses.
- Kind
- Implicit
- As of
- Provision
- S.C. Code Ann. sec. 39-80-70(A)(3) (annual public report must account for the number and types of harm reports received and how they were handled)
- Trigger
- personal_data_processing
What this law does
The Age-Appropriate Design Code applies to a covered online service reasonably likely to be accessed by a minor (a person under 18). It is not a general controller or processor personal-data regime; it imposes design and data-minimization duties specifically toward minor users, including default privacy settings, limits on profiling, targeted advertising, and precise-geolocation collection for known minors, parental controls, and an annual public report by an independent auditor.
The Act was enacted as Act No. 96 of 2026 (H. 3431, the South Carolina Social Media Regulation Act on its own caption) and creates Chapter 80 of Title 39; it took effect immediately upon the Governor's approval on . It is not to be confused with H. 3402, a different, still-pending bill sharing the short title 'Age-Appropriate Design,' which would have created Chapter 79 and never advanced past referral to House Judiciary.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app serves under-18s, makes high-risk automated decisions or processes personal data.
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