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.
It’s already laughably easy to parent these days. Parental controls are on every device and require so little effort. You dont even have to pay that much attentjo - the software literally analyzes use and reports notification. It’s so stupidly easy and still people can’t do it. Literally ask any of supporters of this what parental control system they use and most are dumbfounded and just change the topic.
It’s never about protecting kids.
Eh… I agree that age checks are dumb, but have you ever tried parental controls on most phones these days? They are all complete shit.
What? The software is incredible these days. It literally detects dangers and warns you. Check out Bark which is only 14$/mo but even Google family does a lot of that for free
Last I looked the kid just needed to learn how to vpn and it was over. Granted that was a few years ago. But I’ve not seen a software solution that there wasn’t a way around. Unless you get something like a Gab phone for them.
If the child ignores the parents and uses hacks to bypass parenting controls then no parenting control will ever help. It’s a tool and it must be based on existing parenting foundation not replace parenting.
If a child receives a smartphone the very minimum parents must do is establish trust in the social contract between the two parties: “I give you a phone and use a privacy respecting parental control if you agree to not mess with it and keep me in the loop”. If this simple base cannot be established then all parental control is moot and we failed already.
It’s really not that hard. I used to think these magement and conflict parts are the hard parts of parenting but it’s really not, the hard part is how much time/energy kids eat up to the point where it’s easy to be lazy and not pursue management solutions which are really simple.