When I first played Cyberpunk 2077, its dystopian world was what drew me in. A place where surveillance was part of daily life, and questioning any of the big corpos meant you would probably disappear one night, never to be found again.
Years later, in 2026, I am sitting here wondering—this is not fiction, but something that could really happen one day, seeing how things are escalating thanks to a cabal of senile cretins and how quickly rights are being stripped from the general public.
You might've already noticed that there's a trend among governments to bring in age verification for deterring children from being exposed to harmful content and people.
But the methods deployed to ensure compliance either ask you to fork over extremely sensitive PII or fill out a form that *sternly* asks you of your age or age bracket.
Age Verification, Why?
A few days ago, we saw the U.S. state of Colorado wanting to make operating systems hand over age bracket data to apps. This would work via an API that transmits a user-reported "age signal" to verify a person's age range before they use the software.
While this is set for a January 1, 2028 adoption, there are a few hurdles it has to cross before it is set in stone.
A similarly worded bill has already been passed in California, where the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was signed into law back in October 2025.
Starting in 2027, it mandates that OS providers collect a user's birth date, age, or both at account setup and provide a signal to developers via a real-time API. This effectively forces the computer itself to act as the primary gatekeeper, telling every app you launch exactly which age bracket you fall into.
The Other Side
A federal judge in Virginia blocked the state from enforcing its social media age-limit law (SB 854) just a few days ago. The judge ruled that the mandate, which forced platforms to verify ages and limit minors to one hour of daily use, violates First Amendment rights by overextending to both adults and children and leaving out addictive interactive games.
Then there's Discord, which tried implementing an age verification system that blew up in its face. It had to distance itself from Persona after a massive backlash over privacy and security, and people were already on edge after a previous breach exposed nearly 70,000 government IDs. The situation has now hit a new low point where researchers have discovered Persona’s code was tied to extensive surveillance checks and global watchlists.
Even people over on Reddit are calling out such moves, with a Redditor, ForeverHuman1354, putting out a call to resist system-level age verification checks. They point out that even if the law in California doesn't require forking over identification, what's to stop anyone from normalizing doing so in the future?
And these age checks could easily be repurposed to identify the user of an app or operating system; not that Big Tech hasn't already done that with their never-ending greed for our data.
💬 Where do you think we’re headed? Is this really about safeguarding children, or are we just living out the plot of an Orwellian horror novel?
