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.
Linux won’t be legal in Colorado if they pass this. You’ll need an account with some age-policing, ID-reporting corporation to be able to use a computing device.
How do they imagine they could enforce this though? Presumably quite selectively, based on the user’s political leanings.
The courts should strike it down, I don’t have faith they will side with the constitution, but it’s clearly unconstititional and beyond the authority of the state as well, in the realm of interstate commerce which is explicitly given to the feds, whom can’t be trusted either obviously.
But the 1st amendment is clearly invalidating this, forcing people to identify themselves to groups that will record everything they say or do and sell it to everyone, including the government, that will chill speech, and groups will punish people for their speech.
Too bad scotus is all in on punishing people for speech though.
I don’t think it will be cut and dry on state vs federal, although if we follow trends it will get shutdown because the feds love abusing the commerce and elastic clause. And I’m not overly familiar with the Colorado constitution, but the actual text isn’t actually that invasive, it makes no requirements on data collection, it only requires for it to be obtained somehow, which could be self reporting ala parental controls, it only requires that once the data is obtained that they must provide an age bracket and only and age bracket to services that request it and only services that request it.
The very act of forcing it to be collected chills freedom of speech. Leaving it undefined how it’s done should make the law more likely to get overturned not less.
Knowing your age was collected, and is stored somewhere, connected to your computer, and that everything done on that computer can then be connected back to that positive ID, chills speech, as much as they might try to betray the bill of rights with this mealy mouthed attempt to surrender us to Tech.
Not defend Democrats too much here, but they clearly have far less of a habit of doling out enforcement based on political leanings than the Republicans, even if they do enforce things quite selectively when it comes to actual leftists while letting Nazis run around with seeming impunity.
Colorado has been a solidly Blue state since the end of the W. Bush years, and even then, it was pretty split down the middle with just over half of the votes going to Bush. It’s honestly been mostly-Blue-dominated since 1992. (Lauren Boebert notwithstanding)
Further, the two main sponsors of the bill are both Democrats. This genuinely seems to me to be another example of “heart in the right place but don’t know what the fuck they’re actually doing” which seems common for the tech illiterate and often for Democrats in general.
Once again, not saying Democrats aren’t guilty of selective enforcement, just pointing out that they’re far less likely to do so (or at least less likely to do so against conservatives, for genuine leftists it seems up for debate).
Now, that also means nothing in context to how other politicians can use this kind of legislation negatively, even if the writers and sponsors truly have the best of intentions. Democrats had the best intentions when it came to the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as well, and way back then folks like me were saying “this seems pretty dangerous, especially if we ever have a despot take control of the country and the levers for these tools” which clearly has come to pass.
How do you know what their intentions were?
Well, not all of them, obviously. Yet, for example, I tend to think Joe Biden actually did have good intentions considering the bulk of the PATRIOT Act was based on his prior legislation in the 90s, his Omnibus Counterterrorism Act. It’s worth noting this was in response to a wave of US homegrown right-wing white nationalist radicalism and terrorism in the 1990’s such as Waco and Ruby Ridge. The Oklahoma City Bombing would happen a month after this bill first appeared. Considering the shitstorm we’re in regarding virulent white nationalist terrorism, I kind of think back when he first wrote it that it wasn’t such a bad idea.
People who were more clearly war hawks like Hillary Clinton? Probably a lot less likely to have had great intentions.
Yet others, like Ron Wyden, who has been a consistent critic of the out of control national security state and voted against military intervention in Iraq in 2002 also voted for the PATRIOT Act. He also spent a great deal of time trying to amend the PATRIOT Act as well.
And as much as Democrats drink from the same well of corporate funding as Republicans, I wouldn’t say the majority of the party is outright evil or don’t care what happens to their constituents. Schumer obviously doesn’t give a fuck, but I also don’t think he’s actually representative of the party as a whole as much as he just has power in a party that puts seniority over merit in intraparty politics.
It’s easy to forget how much shock and terror 9/11 really did put into people which colored how quickly they foolishly signed off on the PATRIOT Act.
You lost all credibility early on in your first statement, to anyone living in reality paying attention, your analysis is worth nothing.
The left was saying that the PATRIOT Act was a bad idea from day one, just like we were with the Iraq War. People keep ignoring the left (or dismiss us as paranoid) and we keep getting proven right over and over and over again.
No shit, I was one of those people. I just don’t ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, being out of touch, and not thinking through long-term political consequences. Once again, the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act was largely in response to white nationalist home-grown terrorism, which not having squashed that in the 90s is literally part of why we have the problems we have to day with a white nationalist government. Still didn’t make it great, but I have a lot more sympathy for its origins in that era.
Unfortunately, if left unchecked, an incompetent ally is just as destructive as a malicious adversary. If you are from Colorado and take issue with this legislation you should contact your representatives and let them know that they are being idiotic since that is the only meaningful difference between the two. Overall, we can continue giving the dems a pass because they are the lesser of the evils, or we can attempt to use what little political capital we have to make them realise their errors.
Exactly. That was essentially my point regarding those who supported the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the DHS which both have been widely abused since their inception (although thankfully the PATRIOT Act was finally sunseted). That it’s important to help the politicians who think they’re helping but are actually creating a more dangerous environment understand why what they’re proposing is dangerous rather than to cynically reject all government as bad and to give up entirely. Thank you for stating it more clearly than I did.
Are they going to check people’s PCs at the state borders as they move in then?
What is in the actual bill? I haven’t read any of this but if it was just a year of birth box at local signup then this could actually be pretty good. A sort of halfway between local only parental controls & age-policing, ID-reporting corporations.
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051
Here’s a summary, but the text of the actual bill can be gotten by clicking on “Recent Bill (PDF)”
This looks like self-reporting. ie: no third party ID snooping badness. Am I missing something?
I don’t think your missing anything, granted it doesn’t make any assertions about how the data should be attained, just that they must somehow obtain it. In general it reads as requiring at the minimum parental controls on a system.