AINEWS
Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday signed a bill pushing age checks out of individual apps and into the device's operating system. Illinois is the third state, after Colorado and California, to require it.
By January 1, 2028, every covered manufacturer has to ship a new account-setup screen that asks a parent or account holder for a child's birth date during setup and returns one of four age brackets: under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 and up. The bracket, not the date, is what travels, and it travels encrypted. House Bill 5511, the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, sets the new default in Illinois. Covered manufacturers, in the bill's terms, are device makers, operating system providers, and app stores.
Open-source software is software whose source code can be read, modified, and redistributed by anyone: the model behind Linux, Firefox, and most of the public internet's plumbing. The Illinois framework puts the OS, not the app, in charge of declaring a user's age to every service on the device. By July 1, 2028, apps have to start requesting the bracket through an API. An app that pulls a minor bracket is treated under Illinois law as having "actual knowledge" of a child's age, the same standard the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act applies to websites that learn a user is under 13.
From that moment, a defined list of safety defaults flips on inside the app: a restricted feed, a profile hidden from adult strangers, blocked adult messages, a masked precise location, and a notification queue that goes quiet between 10 PM and 7 AM. Parents can turn the defaults off. Minors over 16 can turn them off themselves. The defaults don't have to be perfect. A manufacturer or app that relies in good faith on the bracket isn't liable when the OS later turns out to be wrong. The penalty for noncompliance is up to $50,000 per violation, enforced by the Illinois Attorney General.
The Illinois bill is the third move in the same national pattern. itsfoss.com, a Linux and open-source news outlet, reports that Colorado's SB26-051 and California's AB-1043 draft the same device-level age-signal pattern. Colorado's bill was originally written with no exemption for operating systems. Illinois's available text doesn't, on the face of the summary carried by itsfoss, contain that carveout, and the Hacker News thread on the signing reads the law as the next round in a fight the open-source community is already fighting in Colorado.
The bill passed 82-27 in the House and 57-0 in the Senate, with final concurrence unanimous. House lead sponsor was Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz; Senate lead was Sen. Willie Preston. Pritzker's office, in its signing announcement, called the law "nation-leading legislation to protect Illinois children on social media."
The open question is what gets carved out next, and who counts as a manufacturer. Whether the bill's reach stops at the storefronts and the dominant mobile operating systems, or pulls in the long tail of community-run systems, is the watch item as the implementation rules get written and as the multistate map fills in.