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.
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.
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.