While California is pushing such a law, Colorado also followed suit with their own bill demanding the same.
The Orwellian age verification laws keep getting more and more 1984-esque.
When age verification government surveillance laws were first pushed, the talking point (obviously a lie) was that such laws were only going to specifically target porn websites. Some of those proposals specifically stated that if the website contains a certain percentage of pornographic material, then the law would require that the website would implement an age verification system allegedly to prevent minors from accessing that material. In the process, lawmakers assured everyone that such laws are extremely specific and wouldn’t even affect anyone else – assuring people that there is absolutely no way that such laws would get expanded on. Insert audience laughter here.
Since lawmakers were assuring people that these laws were specifically for just pornographic websites, naturally, they had every intention of expanding such laws in the first place. At first, it was by quietly expanding age verification to all websites. Shortly after, age verification was explicitly expanded to include all social media. Then, there was a push to add age verification to search engines.
Then, when age verification inevitably failed on all fronts, lawmakers started pushing for even more. There were efforts to rope VPNs into age verification and even a push to have age verification be put in app stores. Now, as the Discord data leak proved, age verification is little more than government surveillance as governments like the US to implement a mass 24/7 government surveillance system on the internet in general. None of that is even in question at this stage. So, it seems that lawmakers are going to just drop what little pretense is left and take it all the way.
California is proposing legislation to bake mass government surveillance directly into your computers operating system. From PCGamer:
The government of California is implementing a law that requires operating system providers to implement some form of age verification into their account setup procedures.
Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal). The bill states, among other factors, that “An operating system provider shall do all of the following:”
“(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
“(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user.”
The categories are broken into four sections: users under 13 years of age, over 13 years of age under 16, at least 16 years of age and under 18, and “at least 18 years of age.”
California isn’t the only one ensuring that your online activity is observed under his watchful eye. Colorado is apparently also proposing a similar law. From Gizmodo:
Colorado is the latest state looking to join that list. Colorado state legislators Sen. Matt Ball and Rep. Amy Paschal introduced the bill SB26-051 last month. It’s based on AB-1043, also known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, a similar California bill that was passed in October and will take effect in 2027.
“One of the reasons for bringing SB 51 was that the tech and software industry is already complying with AB 1043, so there’s minimal added burden,” Ball told PCMag last week. “The intent is to create thoughtful safeguards for kids online through a privacy-forward framework for age assurance.”
Differing from other legislation, both the Colorado bill and the California law require operating system providers like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to verify user age instead of leaving that duty to the apps.
Here’s how it works. Your operating system will require you to verify your age when you first set up your device, creating a digital signal that puts you into a certain age bracket. Then, any time you try to download an app with restricted content, it will use that digital age signal to determine if you are allowed to access it. That’s unless “ia developer has clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by an age signal,” the bill says.
If the bill passes, violations will range from $2,500 to $7,500 for each minor affected.
The insanity of these proposals is off the charts here. Nothing about this even remotely looks workable given the existence of Linux. Second, this is an obvious attempt to implement government surveillance at a very fundamental level that has shades of the nightmarish concept of trusted computing. The government clearly wants all users to have all of their real time activity monitored and trackable. What programs do you have installed? What websites do you visit? Who are you communicating with? What are you posting? So on and so forth.
These bills are all kinds of fucked up, no doubt about it. Still, it matches the trajectory these so-called “age verification” bills in numerous jurisdictions. It was only a matter of time before it came down to this and, well, now this nightmare scenario seems to be appearing.
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Ok there is so much misinformation on these laws its not even funny. Even here it seems.
Basically I looked into it and both of these bills specifically state they dont require any form of identification/facial scanning/credit card info/etc. Its literally just inputting date of birth. Thats it. after word your set to a age range and can access content at leisure with a built in “token” of sorts with no identifying info.
When this bill came up last year for california various privacy experts and data protection expects were praising it. in fact even EFF and Free Speech Coalition were saying this is the way better privacy and data protection respecting way of doing things. In fact when FSC was here for the s-209 Committee meetings they were recommending this over s-209, and iirc Michael Ghiest was recommending this too over s-209
Its basically just better parental controls, but because people are more knee jerky and colorado made a similar bill people are freaking out without properly looking up.
I will preface my comment by saying this: I don’t expect anyone to agree with absolutely everything I have to say on different subjects. I’m perfectly OK if people disagree. In fact, I do look at comments that disagree with intellectual curiosity because I want to know if I did let my humanity slip through and made a mistake somewhere along the line. After all, I’ve had people think that I’m more robot than human with what I’ve outputted over the years.
With that said, here is my response.
‘There is no way that age verification would go beyond pornographic websites. It’s very targeted to a specific part of the internet.’
‘There is no way that age verification would go beyond the large platforms.’
‘There is no way that age verification could possibly suffer from a data leak.’
‘There is no way that age verification could possibly get hacked.’
‘There is no way that age verification is a surveillance mechanism in disguise because it doesn’t collect personal information.’
‘There is no way that age verification could be used for all cell phones.’
‘There is no way that age verification could apply to everyone. It’s just for specific apps.’
‘There is no way that age verification would go beyond typing your age when activating your computer operating system.’ (We are here)
Given that Windows is already notorious for collecting vast troves of telemetry on its users, we are already getting dangerously close to the government demanding that OS vendors hand over everything they know about their users. I don’t think for a second that even the government thinks that typing an age is sufficient given that computers are frequently shared with multiple people. It’s clearly the latest trial balloon to see if they can actually get away with such a law before shoehorning something more dangerous down the line.
I’ve already seen age verification pushers be given an inch on these issues and they’ve already taken the circumference of the planet. I’ve seen this time and time again and I don’t think for a second that those same lawmakers are going to sit there and say ‘Yeah, I think we’ve done enough on this front. We’ll draw the line here.’ I haven’t seen these lawmakers stop before and I’m not convinced at this stage they are going to stop now.
Another way to look at it is this: what is even the point of these two bills in the first place? What problem are lawmakers hoping to solve by requiring people type a date of birth when activating their operating system? Taken in a vacuum, these bills are a complete waste of time. Taken in the context of the years of mission creep from the broader age verification debate, however, and you see this as part of a much bigger pattern of applying more and more intrusive surveillance systems in more and more aspects of our online lives under the guise of “protect the children”.
It’s less of a legal effort and more of a social experiment. How much blowback is such an idea going to have? This is where I see the true purpose of such bills.
That is how I came about my conclusions. That being that politicians are looking at taking things all the way and targeting everyone at the device level. I sincerely hope it doesn’t come down to that (broader surveillance that goes beyond typing a date of birth), but the track record of these debates over the years doesn’t exactly make me hopeful.
I see your point but from what Ive read there are safeguards to prevent this from going beyond just a date of birth check. as for whats the point? simpily put, forces the onus of stopping kids from seeing adult stuff on the parents.
the big reason AV bills exist in the first place is because parents ether ignore or dont know how to use parental controls. by putting in the DOB of the primary user of a device at setup it basically is parental controls that are unskippable/unignorable to the parent setting up the device to the kid.