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.
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
I’m sorry, but paying a third party subscription for a janky solution isn’t “incredible”.
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.
From what I’ve seen on iOS it seems pretty tied down. You can set times when they can use specific apps, choose if they can edit contacts, have contact with people not in their contacts, make it so they can’t change their passcode, make it so they can’t log out of their account so they can’t bypass it, set up ask to buy or w.e and make it so they can’t install apps without your permission or get approvals sent to you for purchasing things. You can review all their screen times for individual apps without even picking up their device… And modify it from your device.
The only real bypass would be to factory reset the phone using a computer, but to get passed the activation lock they would need the password, and you could simply put the trust phone number as the parents number, thus the phone would be a brick and the parent would be notified when they attempted(and failed) to log back into the phone.