A United States federal appeals court has upheld an injunction blocking California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which would have required online services likely to be accessed by children to estimate user ages, default minors into high-privacy settings, and conduct data protection impact assessments. The Ninth Circuit ruled that the law's age-estimation mandate and restrictions on profiling likely violate the First Amendment by compelling platforms to collect more user data and restricting lawful speech, siding with industry coalition NetChoice.
The constitutional collision between age-estimation mandates and privacy rights underscores the regulatory paradox: laws designed to protect children by forcing platforms to surveil them more invasively. Guardii solves the policy dilemma by operating downstream of identity verification, monitoring the substance of interactions rather than inferring age from behavioural metadata. Its anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection filters intercept predatory contact in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox regardless of whether the platform knows a user's precise birthdate, flagging hostile patterns and escalating threats to parents or authorities without the data-collection burden that triggered this injunction. World-leading AI trained on harm-specific signals delivers the protective outcome California sought, without the constitutional overstep the court rejected.
