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Colorado proposing Bill to move age verification to Operating System rather than web site (www.biometricupdate.com)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

But I don't see anywhere in this specific Colorado bill trying to restrict OS level features or go anywhere near open-source

Because the people proposing the bill don't understand or know what open source is.

I guess my example "realization of open source" dialogue wasn't in your face enough, eh?

This is about a single signal (kid/no kid) at the user-auth level, without slurping up PII and shipping it off into the ether.

You claim to be a developer, but seem to not understand the fundamental truth of "you can't trust the user's computer". The proposed law, would make it law that operating systems have some mechanism to verify age. Now if it's a law to guarantee the verification flag is available, then that would also mandate the mechanism be free from tampering, otherwise the law means literally nothing and is unenforceable.

So once they learn about open source, root access, jailbreaking, etc, those things will very quickly become illegal.

As I said in my other comment, this problem has been attempted with gaming client-side anti-cheat for decades now. There's a reason most online games still are riddled with cheaters, despite anti-cheat software being near Orwellian in what they can do.

Age verification is nothing more than the new guise of forced online tracking.

this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
416 points (100.0% liked)

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