A U.S. federal appeals court has upheld a preliminary injunction blocking California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would have required technology companies to estimate the age of child users, default to high privacy settings for minors, and conduct risk assessments for features that could harm children under 18. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law likely violates the First Amendment by compelling speech through mandatory age estimation and by restricting how companies can communicate with minors. Industry group NetChoice, which brought the challenge, argued the law would force platforms to collect more data from young users rather than less.
Litigation over data-minimisation mandates and speech restrictions has delayed implementation of several U.S. state child-safety laws, leaving a gap between legislative intent and operational protection. Rather than restructuring platform architecture or universal data collection to infer age, filtering systems such as Guardii deploy real-time pattern recognition against grooming, sextortion and child sexual abuse material in direct messages across Discord, Instagram, Snapchat and Roblox, flagging hostile contact irrespective of the user's declared or estimated age. The approach addresses the harm layer without dependence on age inference or content restriction that triggers constitutional challenge.
