Senate Bill 26-051 reflects that pattern. The bill does not directly regulate individual websites that publish adult or otherwise restricted content. Instead, it shifts responsibility to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure.
Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established. The provider would then generate an age bracket signal and make that signal available to developers through an application programming interface when an app is downloaded or accessed through a covered application store.
App developers, in turn, would be required to request and use that age bracket signal.
Rather than mandating that every website perform its own age verification check, the bill attempts to embed age attestation within the operating system account layer and have that classification flow through app store ecosystems.
The measure represents the latest iteration in a series of Colorado efforts that have struggled to balance child safety, privacy, feasibility and constitutional limits.
As a parent, I wish someone would develop a cross platform, open source, parental control tool that preserves privacy while allowing for strong controls that are simple to use. The best I could come up with is a separate instance of Pihole that any device my kids use is linked to. It would be nice if there was a software option or something implemented in hardware that allowed parents to register the device with the user’s age (no identifying info). Laws could then be passed forcing certain websites and apps to reject any users under a certain age. The restrictions could automatically lift when the user reaches a predetermined age. I’m not an expert so there are probably aspects of this I haven’t thought through but it seems better than what has been implemented so far.
Have you checked your modem/Wi-Fi router?
Sounds Dumb, I know, but many have them baked in.
It may not be perfect, but it covers all devices unless you can login.
It’s a little clunky, but you can do this with one Pi-Hole instance by using the Groups feature. In the “Groups” tab make a group for your default Pi-Hole settings (or just use the already included Default group), and then make a separate group for the additional blocked domains for your children’s devices (for purposes here we’ll refer to this group as “Child”). In your Lists tab, choose which Group each list should be applied to (or choose the group it should be applied to while adding the entry). In your Clients tab use the drop down menu to choose and assign devices to Groups, put all your devices in the Default group and put all your children’s devices in both the Default Group and the Child Group. This way your devices will have the default blocklists and your children’s will have the default plus the additional blocklists aimed to protect them specifically.
Thanks for this! I’m still relatively new to Pi-Hole. I’ll give it a look.
No problem, I’ve been using Pi-Hole for years but have only recently started exploring options with the Groups feature. In fact I spent a few minutes messing around with it before I wrote my original reply to make sure I was going to explain it right. Don’t be afraid to hit me up with questions, I’d be happy to try to help.
I’m not in IT and only have tangential knowledge, but I would think something like corporate internet control would work for this. I know my company has blanket access restrictions with the ability to modify them on an individual basis. But I haven’t the slightest idea how to implement that. I think all of my company device data goes through a tunnel.
You’d think so, but I promise you that a teenager will work their way around most internet based blocks eventually. The thing that gets you in a corpo environment is that they fully log your browsing, so yeah you managed to find fuckmyfacesilly.com that wasn’t blocked, but you’re going to have a little talk with management as soon as someone checks the logs.
Are you telling me I can’t fire my kids if they find a way around? Seriously though, my kids are still relatively young so the pihole solution should work for a bit. Neither will figure out how to change DNS settings for a while.
If you’re allowing full-client-logs on Pi-Hole, anything that passes through it will be seen in your Pi-Hole logs in the same way.