Time-Spent Data Disclosure + Researcher Safe Harbor

Every iPhone and Android phone is built to measure how long its owner spends in each app, how often they pick it up, and how many notifications pull them back. None of it reaches the public, so parents, researchers, and legislators are left guessing. Congress should protect the researchers, let Americans share their own data, and make the national numbers public.

The Problem

American teenagers report spending nearly five hours a day on social media,¹ and 45% say it is too much, up from 36% in 2022.² These platforms entertain and connect. They also shape habits, beliefs, and cultural norms.

Their pull works on the gap between first- and second-order preferences: what we reach for in the moment, and what we want for our lives. Feeds learn from what we do, so they tend to serve the first.³ In one randomized experiment, self-control problems drove an estimated 31% of participants' social media use.⁴

But as a society, we can barely see any of it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics can tell you Americans spent about 11 minutes a day on lawn and garden care in 2025;⁵ no federal statistic can tell you how long they spend on any single app. Investors can buy daily, app-by-app estimates;⁶ the public gets self-reports, which rarely match what devices record.⁷ Three barriers keep it that way:

1. Researchers get shut out. In 2021, Facebook cut off NYU researchers studying its political ads, blaming its FTC privacy order; the FTC called that claim inaccurate.⁸ No federal law protects this research.
2. The data stays locked in. Apple blocks apps from sending a user's screen-time data off the phone, even at the user's request,⁹ so researchers resort to screenshots.¹⁰
3. Laws go unmeasured. Meta's $17 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general commits it to block minors' access overnight,¹¹ and from January 2027 New York will bar platforms from sending minors notifications between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent.¹² No public statistic will show whether either works.

Why legislation: Scientists disagree about how much harm social media does. The nation's top health and science authorities agree on how to find out: the Surgeon General told policymakers to "ensure technology companies share data" with independent researchers and the public,¹³ and the National Academies said that if companies will not cooperate, "Congress should act."¹⁴ No federal law does this today. Companies that have grown this large on American markets, laws, and infrastructure should make their impact knowable.

The Solution

A four-step staircase: each step stands alone, and each step up adds public knowledge and obligation. Thresholds: phone operating systems above 25 million monthly U.S. users (in practice, iOS and Android); apps above 10 million.

Step 1 — Protect the researchers. Bar large platforms and operating systems from cutting off, banning, or suing qualified academic and medical researchers who study their effects with lawfully obtained or user-donated data. Washington already shields good-faith security research from prosecution;¹⁵ research into a product's effects on its users deserves the same, in statute.

Step 2 — Let Americans take their data with them. Give users sovereignty over their own records: operating systems must let users export screen-time data in a standard format and share it, revocably, with apps and studies they choose (with parental consent for minors). Parents get better tools, rivals can compete with Apple's and Google's own, and scientists get consented data at scale. Privacy should protect a person's data from others, not from the person.

Step 3 — Publish the national numbers. Operating systems report monthly for every covered app, on a six-month delay to protect market-sensitive information:

• Metrics: monthly and daily active users and devices, reported separately; total foreground hours; mean, median, 90th- and 95th-percentile minutes per active day; sessions per day and median session length; share of users above two hours a day; nighttime minutes; notifications; and pickups.
• Broken out by: month, state, age band, and device type.

The result is a national baseline of which apps, how long, at what hours, for which ages, and whether use is rising. Any legislature or attorney general could then test whether rules like these work.

Step 4 — Count the whole screen. Phones miss the living room, where YouTube now draws 13.8% of all TV viewing.¹⁶ Extend the same reporting to the largest platforms' web and TV use, with independent audits.

Where to start: Step 1 is the floor; it asks nothing of companies but restraint. Step 3 is the heart of the proposal.

Administration and enforcement: The FTC writes rules within 12 months; compliance follows a year later. Civil penalties for missed or false reports, obstructed sharing, and retaliation against protected researchers.

Risks and Mitigations

• Privacy: Public figures are aggregates only, with small groups suppressed; individual records move only by a user's (or parent's) revocable choice. Apple already uses differential privacy to learn from users collectively without learning about individuals.¹⁷
• First Amendment: Expect a challenge: NetChoice is suing to block Minnesota's platform-disclosure law, including its time-spent statistics, as compelled speech.¹⁸ Content-neutral counts of minutes stand on firmer ground than the content-moderation reports the Ninth Circuit found content-based in X Corp. v. Bonta (2024),¹⁹ but the risk remains.
• Time is not harm: True, which is why the staircase pairs public numbers with research access. Hours show where to look; research shows what they do.

Similar Bills

Fit measures similarity to this proposal's mechanisms: High = direct precedent; Partial = useful component with material differences; Related = adjacent approach.

Federal — 119th Congress

State

What this adds: Public time-use statistics are already law in Minnesota and written into the leading federal kids' online safety bill. This proposal makes the numbers comparable across every major app by measuring at the operating system, adds the metrics that matter most for children (nighttime use, notifications, pickups) by state and age, and pairs public numbers with user data rights and researcher protection.