Colorado legislators have introduced a bill that would force operating system providers like Apple and Google to collect users’ ages during device setup and share that data with apps through a built-in verification system. Senate Bill 26-051, titled “Age Attestation on Computing Devices,” represents a sharp departure from earlier state efforts that targeted individual websites, instead pushing age checks deeper into the software that runs phones, tablets, and computers. If enacted, the measure would make Colorado one of the first states to regulate how operating systems themselves handle age data, with enforcement power resting with the state Attorney General.
From Websites to Operating Systems
Most state-level age verification laws have focused on blocking minors from specific categories of websites. Colorado followed that pattern with its 2025 proposal to regulate online sexual content, laid out in a bill targeting certain web platforms that would have required age checks on sites hosting sexual materials, with an effective date of July 1, 2026. That measure treated each website as its own gatekeeper, requiring operators to confirm a visitor is not a child before granting access. The approach mirrors laws passed in other states, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld a Texas porn-site age verification law, giving states a green light to experiment further with online age restrictions.
The earlier Colorado proposal spelled out in more detail how covered sites would need to verify that an individual is not a child, but it still assumed that each website or service would build its own compliance tools. SB26-051 takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than asking thousands of individual websites and apps to each build their own verification systems, the bill shifts that burden to the companies that control the operating systems running on consumer devices. The logic is straightforward: if Apple, Google, and Microsoft already require account creation to use their platforms, they can collect age information once and distribute it to every app in the ecosystem. That single collection point replaces a patchwork of site-by-site checks with a centralized system baked into the device itself.
How the Age Signal Would Work
The bill’s technical architecture centers on two requirements. First, operating system providers must build an “age attestation interface” into the account-setup process that collects a user’s birth date or age. Second, providers must generate what the bill calls an “age signal,” a piece of data that sorts users into one of four minimum brackets: under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, and 18 and older. Those brackets align with existing federal thresholds for children under 13, while adding finer granularity for teenagers. The introduced statutory language defines these brackets as a floor, meaning OS providers could add more specific categories but cannot offer fewer.
App developers would access the age signal through a real-time API that the operating system provider must maintain. When a user opens an app or creates an account within one, the developer can query the API and receive the user’s age bracket without ever seeing the underlying birth date. This design attempts to split the difference between child safety and privacy: apps learn whether someone is a minor, but the specific personal data stays with the OS provider. The bill requires that the API operate in real time, preventing workarounds where outdated age data could persist as a user ages into a new bracket. Because the obligation is tied to operating systems rather than specific app categories, everything from social networks to games to productivity tools could be built around the same age-aware infrastructure.
Enforcement, Timelines, and Legislative Context
The Colorado Attorney General would hold sole enforcement authority over the age attestation proposal, according to the bill’s text and its accompanying fiscal analysis. That centralized enforcement model avoids the flood of private lawsuits that has complicated similar tech regulation in other states, instead relying on investigations and negotiated settlements. The state’s general rules for effective dates indicate that, absent a safety clause, new laws typically take effect months after adjournment, which gives OS providers and app developers some lead time to build and test new systems before enforcement begins.
Colorado’s broader legislative record on technology shows how contested these mandates can be. In April 2025, the governor vetoed a separate bill titled “Protections for Users of Social Media” that would have required companies to make “commercially reasonable efforts” to identify user age categories for reporting purposes, a decision documented in the state’s prior-session archives. That veto signaled executive-branch skepticism toward mandating age identification on tech platforms, even when the requirement stopped short of full verification. SB26-051 goes considerably further than the vetoed bill by requiring actual data collection at the device level, which raises the question of whether it can survive the same political scrutiny. Observers tracking these measures often rely on the legislature’s searchable bill digests to compare how lawmakers have framed successive attempts to regulate online youth safety.
A De Facto National Standard?
The most consequential feature of SB26-051 may not be what it does inside Colorado but what it forces outside the state. Apple and Google each operate unified app ecosystems that serve users worldwide, and Microsoft’s desktop and mobile platforms similarly depend on single codebases. If Colorado law requires these companies to build age-signal APIs into their operating systems, the engineering changes would almost certainly propagate to every user, not just those with Colorado billing addresses or IP addresses. Past experience with privacy and consumer-protection laws shows why: maintaining separate builds for different states is expensive and error-prone, so companies often adopt the strictest rule as their baseline standard.
That prospect creates a tension with ongoing federal debates. Lawmakers in Washington have spent years discussing updates to children’s privacy rules and considering new frameworks for teen safety online, but they have not yet settled on a single architecture for age assurance. A state-level OS mandate that becomes a de facto national standard could either accelerate or complicate those federal efforts. If major OS providers adopt Colorado’s four-bracket system before Congress acts, federal legislation may end up ratifying an approach designed in Denver rather than Washington. Conversely, a future federal law with different age brackets or privacy requirements could conflict directly with systems already built to satisfy Colorado’s statute, creating compliance headaches and potentially forcing companies to reconcile overlapping mandates.
Privacy Trade-offs at the Device Level
The bill’s design attempts to minimize privacy exposure by keeping raw birth dates with the OS provider and sharing only age brackets with apps. But that framing obscures a deeper shift. Under SB26-051, every device account would carry a persistent age classification accessible to any app that requests it. For adults, this means a new data point (confirmed legal-age status) traveling alongside every app interaction. For minors, the signal effectively creates a digital flag that marks them as children across every application on their device. Whether that flag protects kids or exposes them to new risks depends on how apps use the information: it could power stronger default safety settings, but it might also enable more granular profiling of youth behavior across services.
Because the obligation sits at the operating-system layer, the stakes extend beyond any single category of content. Once an age signal exists, it can be invoked to justify new forms of differentiation, from advertising policies to in-app purchasing controls to educational discounts, and the underlying implementation timelines for state laws give platforms only limited time to anticipate those ripple effects. Supporters argue that a unified system will finally let developers build consistent protections for children and teens, rather than relying on self-attested ages and scattered parental controls. Critics warn that normalizing age flags at the device level may entrench a permanent layer of identity inference into everyday computing, with few avenues for users, especially young people, to opt out. As SB26-051 moves through the legislative process, that clash between safety and privacy is likely to define the debate over whether Colorado should be the state that pushes age verification all the way down into the operating system.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
