Senate Bill 26-051 reflects that pattern. The bill does not directly regulate individual websites that publish adult or otherwise restricted content. Instead, it shifts responsibility to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure.
Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established. The provider would then generate an age bracket signal and make that signal available to developers through an application programming interface when an app is downloaded or accessed through a covered application store.
App developers, in turn, would be required to request and use that age bracket signal.
Rather than mandating that every website perform its own age verification check, the bill attempts to embed age attestation within the operating system account layer and have that classification flow through app store ecosystems.
The measure represents the latest iteration in a series of Colorado efforts that have struggled to balance child safety, privacy, feasibility and constitutional limits.
Now instead of asking to verify age, make the parents input the age bracket and you reinvented parental controls. The correct way to protect children.
HOLY HELL
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH
Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established.
It’s so fucking obvious the people who wrote this have no idea other operating systems than iOS, Windows and Android exist.
What are you on about? If they get 95% of the population with this it’s still a huge win for them.
AFAIK, only adults can sign up for internet access, so a minor watching porn on the internet is the same as said minor watching their parents’ adult DVDs or drinking alcohol their parents purchased. It’s already illegal for adults to give minors access to these things, so what’s next? Alcohol bottles that only open and DVDs / Bluerays that only play if you can provide an ID and prove your age every time?
DON’T give them ideas!
Colorodo democrats have always been lousy. Here they are following texas and montana and tennessee, locking down the internet with dishonest arguments. No one in reality thinks this is about protecting kids, and it’s not the state’s place to do so, it’s the parents, it’s a violation of the 1st amendment to make adults expose their identities to people recording everything they do online and using it against them, and selling it to the government.
We need to repeal these bills, and we need a popular open source of model legislation to counter-act ALEC, that writes these bills and state lawmakers just fill in the blanks, after the united corporations give them a plausible excuse to and pay them off
It is the donors influencing all of them. Corrupt fucks
I actually disagree, because hardware-level verification is basically the most privacy-conscious method of accurately verifying a user’s age. Rather than fighting age verification entirely, I think it’s more productive to start assuming users are under 18 until proven otherwise… Age verification is inevitable, (if you don’t like it, tor is always an option), so we should at least figure out secure and private ways of doing so. Rather than resisting it outright, present them with secure and safe ways to do it. The internet is a dark place full of a lot of creeps, and services like Roblox have proven that they will enthusiastically become nesting grounds for predators unless they’re forced to add safeguards.
Sure, it’s easy to say “just monitor your kids” but no parent can be present 24/7. And in fact, oftentimes parents end up using screen time so they can do other things like chores, without needing to watch their kid. So the “just watch your kids” argument is diametrically opposed to the reality of why parents tend to rely on screens. Sometimes you just need 15 minutes to wash the dishes, without a kid demanding your constant attention. Even I, a child-free person, can understand that. And it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor them as they grow into teens and (reasonably) start expecting their own privacy.
I’ve been saying for a while now that we need to shift to hardware verification. Your device (or for shared devices like desktops, your user account) verifies your age once. And then it doesn’t need to do so again. All of the various sites and apps can simply ask your device “hey, is this user over {age}?” And the device responds with a simple true/false. You’re not needing to give your PII to every single site you visit, and the device isn’t needing to report back to the government every time an age verification check happens. It’s all done locally. The handshake could even be cryptographically secured, to prevent tech-savvy kids from MITM’ing the age check. And then protecting kids online is as simple as not age-verifying their device (and protecting your own password on shared devices). Hell, devices like cell phones could even have the age bracket set by the parent directly, since the phone would be on the parent’s phone bill. Similarly, parents could create child accounts on their shared devices, so kids can access age-appropriate content. It won’t stop kids from getting a prepaid phone, but it’ll at least prevent them from easily verifying that phone.
And it’s also the most elegant for the user experience. As far as the adult user is concerned, they never even see an “are you over 18” verification when they visit a porn site. They simply get access to the site. And kids simply get redirected back to Google’s home page (or more realistically, a page on the porn site saying “hey you failed the age check. If you’re over 18, be sure you do that with your device before trying again, because this is the only page you’ll be able to access until then. Or if you’re under 18, click here to return to where you were before” explanation) as soon as the age check fails.
Hardware age verification is basically the best of every world. You don’t rely on a third-party service to verify your PII (which will inevitably leak it, like Discord did). You don’t need to verify with every single individual site and service. The government doesn’t get a record of every site that asks for verification. And kids are automatically prevented from stumbling across adult content.
I agree that Colorado democrats are typically the “if we cozy up to the right they might stop being mean to us” candidates. I think this bill is a poor implementation, but it’s at least done under the right premise. If we could force hardware manufacturers and/or OSes to support native age verification, it would solve a lot of the current issues that we have.
You make some good points. If what you say is true, then most countries and states won’t adopt this style of verification because compromising everyone is the point. But they could probably set it up so it does compromise everyone at the hardware level.
Is it unrealistic to expect no age checks? We’ve lived through an entire internet without age checks, why is it different now? There aren’t more creeps, the only thing that’s different is our politicians feel emboldened to surrender us to tech. To use age checks as a trojan horse, to get AI behind the walls, to make us all social scores to be used secretly against us.
So I don’t see it as inevitable at all, especially not in the US, with the first amendment. Not in blue states, Colorodo is the only blue state doing any of this as far as I’ve heard either. Because they are conservative sell outs.
So I am on the side or rejecting age checks, and calling them out for what they are, surrendering us to tech for total surveillance, and replacing every politician that has supported it.
We’ve lived through an entire internet without age checks, why is it different now? There aren’t more creeps
I think the big difference is ease of access. For millennials growing up, accessing the internet basically required being at the family desktop in the middle of the living room. Phones weren’t connected to the internet, and cell phones weren’t even common yet.
And kids still got groomed, even when their only access to the internet was in a shared family space. And that began to get more prevalent as devices became smarter and more portable. Now, any 8 year old can get groomed in their own bedroom, while simply playing a video game.
It’s not more common at all, we are being played by the media for this very purpose, and there is no reason we should let them win, there’s no reason they should win, they are using dishonest arguments and a majority agree with us in an honest conversation. Let’s’ call them on their bullshit and stop them, then we can keep your less worse option for when something has to be done, and keep it to show how compromising us is the reason, as they refuse the methods that wouldn’t compromise us.
and it’s not the state’s place to do so, it’s the parents
Not every parent is a good steward or guardian of their children, like those who have been caught cyberbullying their own children or those who send their gay/trans children to conversion camps to “pray the gay away” or even parents who deny their children life-saving vaccination and medical procedures because it conflicts with parental beliefs. A technically proficient parent who is “protecting their kids” could easily be blocking their children from access to information that is important to the child’s development just as much as the government could be.
The argument that it’s always fully the parents right and no one else’s is an unintentional argument in favor of parents treating children like property and normalizing the ability for parents to abuse and control their children under the guise of the false idea that a parent always knows what is best for their child. Plenty of parents shat out kids while knowing fuck-all about how the world works and definitely don’t know what is best for their child.
Government is imperfect, but so are parents.
“OPERATING SYSTEM PROVIDER” MEANS A PERSON THAT DEVELOPS, LICENSES, OR CONTROLS THE OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON A DEVICE.
great, for my devices then, that would be me
Holy fuck this is bad
Only for privacy and anonymity, companies like Google and Microsoft will do fabulously however. Who donates to him I wonder.
Age verification is identity verification.
It’s aight. We have Linux anyways, who cares about Windows?
Ðen ðey’ll classify linux as an 18+ þing, allowing ðem to fine to deaþ every linux website ðat doesnt comply. We still have to care about ðis because when one pillar falls, ðe rest are soon to follow.
This isn’t Reddit, don’t do some weird cult of not using specific letters
I used ðe correct letters, ðough? Just because “th” is more common doesnt mean ðe oðer letters are wrong. Also, you misphrased your arguement, saying “not” and accidentally flipping ðe meaning of what you said.
Nah I meant it as it’s written.
I’ve now changed my mind though, I thought you were doing like those “never use the letter E” weirdos, and I love the Thorn character.
You keep being awesome
Ah. Þank you for clarifying, and þank you for ðe compliment! Hope you have a great day!
Account is created? Who said were making accounts for our operating systems
Not the OS.
The OS “provider”
Linus Torvalds ain’t gonna check my ID. And i don’t want him to, either.
The os provider is the one who installs it on your computer…
>.>
Well, looks like the ‘above 18’ box was checked by the os provider on my computer, I’m good to go!
Even better!
These people are idiots
You will need to verify your age to breath the freaking air next!
For fuck’s sake.
What are parental controls?
Every single one of these places except for maybe fucking discord already had parental controls. Fucking Roblox had pretty good parental controls. Why did none of this laws just say “hey this has to be obvious to setup if the account age is set under this limit” if ot was about protecting kids? Because its not about protecting kids.
You know what ? If this law is only imposed on commercial operating systems, and I can make my free OS lie and say I’m 100+ ; then maybe this could work.
