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

47 Signatures

9 %
500 for collection target

47 Signatures

9 %
500 for collection target
  1. Launched 02/03/2026
  2. Time remaining > 3 months
  3. Submission
  4. Dialog with recipient
  5. Decision
personal data
 

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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
Question to the initiator

Petition details

Petition started: 03/02/2026
Collection ends: 09/03/2026
Region: Colorado
Topic: Consumer protection

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Why people sign

I don't believe that computers should act as agents independent of the user.

I was born and raised in Coloarado, I have been proud of how they have been standing up to this horrific dictatorship administration. Please do not make surveillance for these people easier! This will do nothing to protect children, but we will all lose if we keep giving away our digital rights to privacy!

This does not have Colorado's parents nor children in mind. This is purely for the gain of large tech companies and will be used to farm more and more data from people. This explicitly removes my ability to parent and moves that into the hands of the OS provider. The government is not responsible nor capable of raising my child, so they should not have requirements on my computer that attempt to do so.

With all these issues with age verification world wide it is best to share our concerns and make it clear that plenty of thought has to go into this first before being thrown out.

These laws are plantant attacks on freedom, frees-peach, open source software, and Linux.

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