EdLaw nat/us/state/ca/ab-1856/README.md

language: en · status: enacted · last checked: 2026-10-13

AB 1856 (2026) — Digital Age Assurance Act amendments

Enacted, not yet in effect. AB 1856 (Stats. 2026, ch. 184), approved by the Governor and filed with the Secretary of State on 10 September 2026, amends Civ. Code §§1798.500–1798.504 of the Digital Age Assurance Act. It has no effective-date clause, so it takes effect on 1 January 2027 under Cal. Const. art. IV, §8(c)(1): "a statute enacted at a regular session shall go into effect on January 1 next following a 90-day period from the date of enactment of the statute" — the day the Act itself becomes operative.

Applicability to EdTech

The Legislative Counsel's Digest summarises the change: the bill "would, among other things, delete that definition of “user,” would specify that the requirement of an operating system provider to provide an accessible interface applies if an operating system operates on a device and has an account setup feature, and would require the signal to be provided to a covered application store or application developer, as prescribed. The bill would prohibit a person from requesting a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store if not required to do so by the DAAA or any other applicable law." (Digest). For a developer the last point matters: an app may request the age signal only where the Act or another law requires it.

Key obligations at a glance

Enforcement

Unchanged in kind: the Act's civil penalties enforced by the Attorney General — see §1798.503 as amended.

Contents

Document Covers
AB-1856.md The chaptered bill in full: Legislative Counsel's Digest and the amended §§1798.500–1798.504

Licence

The corpus reproduces the chaptered text of AB 1856 and the Legislative Counsel's Digest verbatim from the California Legislature's own database. Statute text enacted by a state legislature is outside copyright under the government edicts doctrine. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) (slip opinion, read 2026-10-01), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." The Legislature's XML carries the comment "Copyright © Legislative Counsel Bureau, State of California."; the Bureau is the Legislature's own drafting office, and the same opinion holds that "Because Georgia’s annotations are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties, the government edicts doctrine puts them outside the reach of copyright protection." The bulk-export readme (pubinfo_Readme.pdf, read 2026-10-13) states no copyright notice or terms of use.

Conditions: none attach. The corpus names the official source in Sources and in each section's {.meta} provenance line, and Meta describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Sources