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.
Oh, what’s that you’re using? It’s Linux? Sure that’s fine, just make sure the age verification check works on it.
Wait, what do you mean you have “root access”? Why do you keep repeating “it’s my hardware and I own it”? You removed the age check system? You can do that! Hey, he’s not supposed to be able to do that!
Colorado proposes bill to ban open source operating systems
As a parent, systems and web developer of both open source and proprietary software. This would single-handedly be one of the most damaging things to ever happen to the world of personal computing.
It’s a horribly bad opinion. It’s the same old problem with client-side anti-chest. You can’t trust the hardware. If the user has full access to the computer, then they can do whatever they want with it. This is a core issue in security modelling. So what’s the answer? Try to lock down the system. This is why anti-cheat software, to play a video game, has more access to your computer’s hardware than you do as a user. Full access to every single file, data in memory, webcams, things on screen, etc.
What’s going to happen if it becomes mandated that age checks must happen in the OS? We’re going to get computers so locked down that you won’t be able to open a .txt file without some kind of authentication check.
No thanks. I’m happy to avoid every single age-check required service.