Colorado Lawmakers Push for Age Verification at the Operating System Level

Related: SB26-051 Age Attestation on Computing Devices (Colorado General Assembly)

hat tip: Mutahar at SomeOrdinaryGamers

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Source: PC Magazine

Rather than having people verify their age on every app they use, Colorado's SB26-051 would implement a way for devices to share an 'age-bracket' signal to third-party apps.

Michael Kan
Senior Reporter
Edited By: Chloe Albanesius
February 20, 2026

As more US states consider online age-verification requirements, two Colorado lawmakers want to implement the age checks at the operating system-level.

SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner’s age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult. The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an “age bracket,” which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com.

The bill comes from state Sen. Matt Ball and Rep. Amy Paschal, both Democrats. Ball seems to view his measure as pro-privacy and as a way to stop kids from downloading adult-oriented apps. “No personal information is communicated that you could use to identify somebody; it’s just an age bracket signal,” he told the Colorado Springs Gazette.

The legislation seems to also centralize the age check through the OS, rather than mandating that each app enforce their own age-verification mechanism, which can involve scanning the user’s official ID, thus raising privacy and security concerns. The bill also forbids the sharing of the age-bracket data for any other purpose.

But it looks like it’s easy to bypass the age check proposed by SB26-051. ...

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Read more: https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-verification-at-the-operating-system-level