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.
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.