Colorado Legislators Want Device-Level Age Restrictions for Minors. Here’s What That Means

Lawmakers are following in California's foot steps. Could this spark a nationwide trend? As a growing list of countries around the world crack down on social media’s adverse effects on minors, states have begun taking matters into their own hands. Many states, including Texas, Virginia, and Utah, have begun restricting minors from accessing platforms with harmful content like porn. 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 shift from platform-focused enforcement to broader OS-level requirements is reflective of what many tech companies have been calling for. Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed the age verification burden onto phone makers when questioned about weaknesses in Meta’s age verification systems in a landmark trial. “Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately,” Zuckerberg said, per French news outlet Le Monde, adding that device-level checks are actually “pretty easy” for companies to implement. According to court filings as part of that trial, roughly 1-in-5 teens told Meta that they faced unwanted nudes on Instagram, in a survey taken all the way back in 2021. Similar criticism was wielded against the United Kingdom’s new online age verification laws late last year by Pornhub-operator Aylo. Following the passing of the legislation, several analyses found that while traffic to Pornhub and similar porn sites had fallen dramatically, users were still able to access porn by simply going to shadier websites. In November, Aylo reportedly sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft asking the tech giants to implement OS-level age verification. Solomon Friedman, partner at Aylo-owner Ethical Capital Partners, told the BBC that British authorities were “working in good faith,” but controlling access at the device level is more efficient, effective, and “privacy-preserving.” In response, British authorities said that nothing was stopping these tech companies from implementing the OS method and showing evidence of their effectiveness. The Colorado bill is currently limited to apps, sparing websites because similar high-level restrictions would be tougher to implement on browsers. But that ultimately creates a loophole for kids who are determined to reach the restricted content, as does the existence of VPNs. Privacy is paramount to the bill, according to its authors, and the OS providers will be forbidden from sharing the data with third parties for any purpose other than age verification. But it’s not certain if that alone will be able to quell the worries of age verification law skeptics. Bills requiring age verification often face intense scrutiny by those who deem it a privacy hazard. Louisiana’s landmark 2023 Secure Online Child Interaction and Age Limitation Act, for example, was struck down in December over First Amendment violations after a district judge ruled in favor of a trade association for social media platforms like Meta, Snapchat, and X. Critics claim that age verification is an attack on online anonymity, with implications that could reach far beyond minors, as everyone would have to submit to the age verification system. Especially if said age verification is done through providing government IDs or face scans, which is a more reliable way to verify someone’s age than self-reported birth dates, any data breach becomes even more dangerous. In October 2025, for example, Discord announced that roughly 70,000 of its users were impacted in a breach that saw hackers steal ID photos submitted for age verification. For what i