EdLaw
Texas SCOPE Act — Business & Commerce Code Chapter 509
H.B. 18 (88th Legislature, 2023), in force 1 September 2024. Chapter 509 imposes duties on a digital service provider in respect of a known minor (anyone under 18 the provider knows to be a minor): registering the user's age, limits on entering agreements with a minor, a duty to prevent the minor's exposure to listed harms, mandatory parental tools, restrictions on advertising and on algorithmic targeting, and a duty of age verification where a service's content is predominantly harmful material.
Applicability to EdTech
Scope is the whole question here, and Chapter 509 answers it in our favour — twice.
- The chapter applies only to a digital service that (1) connects users so they can socially interact, (2) allows a public or semi-public profile for sign-in, and (3) allows a user to create or post content viewable by other users (§509.002(a)). All three limbs are required.
- Independently of that test, §509.002(b)(7) excludes "an operator or provider regulated by Subchapter D, Chapter 32, Education Code, that primarily provides education services to students or educational institutions", and §509.002(b)(8) excludes a person subject to FERPA that operates a digital service and primarily provides education services to students or educational institutions (§509.002(b)). An EdTech operator caught by Education Code Subchapter D is therefore named out of this chapter — unlike the UK Online Safety Act education exemption, which covers the school and not the vendor.
- Re-assess if a consumer surface ships. Both exclusions turn on primarily providing education services to students or educational institutions; a consumer-facing social product would not obviously ride them, and the §509.002(a) test would then be live.
- The one duty written to reach beyond §509.002(a) is §509.057, whose own trigger is a provider that "knowingly publishes or distributes material, more than one-third of which is harmful material or obscene as defined by Section 43.21, Penal Code" (§509.057(a)) — a threshold about the service's content mix, not about minors using it.
Contents
| Document | Covers |
|---|---|
| SCOPE-ACT.md | Chapter 509 in full — §§509.001–509.152 |
Key obligations at a glance
Applicable only to a provider in scope under §509.002:
- No account agreement with anyone who has not registered their age, and no unreviewed alteration of a registered age — §509.051.
- On an agreement with a known minor: collection and use limited to what is reasonably necessary for the service, and no purchases, sharing, disclosure or sale of the minor's personal identifying information — unless a verified parent provides otherwise under §509.102 — §509.052.
- Develop and implement a strategy to prevent a known minor's exposure to the listed harms — §509.053.
- Provide the parental tools the section enumerates — §509.054.
- Advertising and marketing restrictions towards known minors — §509.055.
- Algorithm restrictions — §509.056.
- A savings clause, not a duty: the subchapter does not prevent collecting, processing or sharing a known minor's personal identifying information where necessary for the six listed purposes (legal process, law enforcement, blocking harmful material, spam filtering, preventing crime, service security) — §509.059.
Enforcement
A violation is a deceptive act or practice actionable under DTPA Subchapter E, solely as an enforcement action by the consumer protection division of the Attorney General's office (§509.151). There is no general private right of action, but a parent or guardian of an affected known minor may seek a declaratory judgment or an injunction (§509.152); class certification of such an action is barred.
Licence
The reproduced text is Tex. Bus. & Com. Code ch. 509, enacted by the Texas Legislature and served by the Texas Legislative Council on statutes.capitol.texas.gov. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)
The reproduced pages carry no copyright notice or terms of use (checked 2026-10-01 against the live pages or the builder's cached copies).
Public-domain text carries no conditions. The corpus attributes it all the same: the {.meta} provenance line on each section names the publisher, the Sources section links the official text, and the Meta section describes what the builder changed (markup and anchors only). Nothing here suggests that the Texas Legislature endorses the corpus.
Related
- Texas Education Code Subchapter D — being regulated there is itself an exclusion from this chapter (§509.002(b)(7))
- Texas TDPSA — the general privacy act; §509.001(6) borrows its style of "personal identifying information"
- UK Online Safety Act 2023 — the same scope question, resolved the other way for vendors
- ICO Children's Code — the UK design-code analogue
- California CAADCA — the California age-appropriate-design statute (enjoined)
- Puerto Rico Ley 185-2024 — minors' online privacy with its own multi-part scope test