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

15 Signatures

3 %
500 for collection target

15 Signatures

3 %
500 for collection target
  1. Launched 02/03/2026
  2. Time remaining > 5 months
  3. Submission
  4. Dialog with recipient
  5. Decision
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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: 09/03/2026
Region: Colorado
Topic: Consumer protection

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Why people sign

Verifying age at the OS level will not stop bad parenting. There are already ways to set up parental controls on nearly all devices and operating systems and the onus should be on the parents to set those controls up in a way that restricts minors from accessing materials they are not allowed to access. The onus should not be on the developer.

Because the government does not belong inside my computer

There needs to be major revisions to this. As Linux user & enthusiast, this would only hinder development. Linux powers most of the world's technologies (Android phones, tablets, cars, IoT devices, etc). I'd really encourage to not go down this path because it would limit true free speech in the State of Colorado.

This law is completely unenforceable. How will you compel an open source project, contributed to by people around the world, to implement this? They will say F you and the people that want it will download and install it. You prevent nothing. The instructions will be simple and plain to understand, with AI to help guide the way. I know what I'm talking about, I'm a Software Engineer, there is no way to implement what you want without fundamentally compromising the security of everyone forced to use it. This means you will have a large population of users that will "illegally" use software without this requirement and an even larger population of people too lazy or ignorant susceptible to future identity theft, something the State may be found liable of due to their legislation.

OS level age verification is !@#$! stupid

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