Region: Colorado
Image of the petition Prevent Colorado from Implementing OS-Level Age Verification

Prevent Colorado from Implementing OS-Level Age Verification

Petition is addressed to:
Colorado General Assembly

48 Signatures

Collection finished

48 Signatures

Collection finished

  1. Launched March 2026
  2. Collection finished
  3. Prepare submission
  4. Dialog with recipient
  5. Decision

Petition addressed to: Colorado General Assembly

As of time of writing, there is a bill that is under consideration in the Colorado General Assembly called Age Attestation on Computing Devices (SB26-051). It is an age verification bill that requires operating system developers to put age checks in place upon making a new account, in order to put said account into an age bracket that restricts the number of apps they can use based on their age bracket. This could lead to security and privacy issues, as well as directly harming open-source developers. A link to the bill can be found here: https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/SB26-051

Reason

Roblox has recently implemented something similar to this proposed bill, and it has issues. A major issue is that it has repeatedly put adults in child age brackets and vice versa, as well as the fact that it is easily bypassed, with one child drawing on their face with a marker and being put in the 21+ age bracket (source 1). The only real way to confirm one's age is through a government-issued ID. However, this imposes privacy and security issues, as demonstrated by a data leak that happened after Discord implemented ID-based age verification in October, where 2 million government IDs were leaked (source 2).
The bill claims that an operating system provider "shall not share an age signal with a third party for a purpose not required by the bill," yet the only thing that happens if they break this rule is that the distributor must pay a fine of up to $2,500 for every minor whose information gets leaked accidentally, and up to $7,500 for every minor whose information gets leaked intentionally. For massive corporations, like Microsoft and Apple, this does virtually nothing, but open-source, nonprofit operating systems, like Linux, will essentially be killed by this bill. Additionally, the bill does not state any form of protection for adults who get their information leaked.

Thank you so much for your support, Daisy Calhalla, Fort Collins
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Petition details

Petition started: 03/02/2026
Collection ends: 07/21/2026
Region: Colorado
Topic: Consumer protection

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