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.
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.
If America or any other society moves to have UBI as the basis of all things, children could have personal agency. If free housing and a monthly income is available to all, alongside free education and healthcare, a child could choose to leave their family at any time. This would go a long way to preventing abuse, allow children to fulfill their personal growth, and so much more.
Family, friendship, and community should exist because people like each other, rather than being a product of authority.
Absolutely agreed, but you’re still going to need a government authority for things like UBI, free housing, and deciding at what age it is reasonable for a child to be emancipated from their parents and live on their own. Obviously a four year old probably isn’t going to be capable of fully caring for themselves, even if they deserve the autonomy from their abusive parents. If I recall correctly, current emancipation laws are roughly around 13 years old, which is when a child is starting to be able to competently care for themselves. However, that still leaves over a decade of potential abusive parenting where someone needs to be raising the child whether it’s a good parent, or a foster parent, or a state institution. More importantly, that decade is the most important period for a child’s development, especially in terms of mental health. So whether we like it or not, there still needs to be some checks on parents just doing whatever the fuck they want to their children during that period.
If there is universal healthcare, caretakers for the elderly and the orphaned should be available. That means a young kid can ask for a caretaker and receive that aid. Kinda like an reverse adoption, where the kid chooses the parent, rather than the other way around.
The government can send a representative to households or schools with a kid under 10 years of age, with the job of asking whether they want to stay. Do this once a year, giving the kid a tablet through which they can securely send a simple survey without showing their parent what they put on it. Depending on what the kid wants, they stay with their family or can tell the state that they are unhappy with where they are.
It wouldn’t be perfect, but at least it gives pathways out of bad situations.