New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Kathy Hochul released final rules for the SAFE for Kids Act on July 28, 2026, establishing criteria to determine which companies must comply and outlining age-verification and parental-consent standards. The rules will be published in the State Register on July 29, with the Act taking effect 180 days later on January 25, 2027. Companies violating the SAFE for Kids Act face civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. The legislation targets addictive algorithmic feeds and nighttime notifications, which are tied to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and sleep disorders among children and teenagers, and prohibits such notifications to minors between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Yet blanket design restrictions—stripping chronological feeds, blocking all push notifications during evening hours—penalise every compliant teen user to constrain a minority of harmful actors, displace grooming and sextortion into unmonitored direct messages, and impose age-verification burdens that erode privacy at scale. Guardii's real-time anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection operates inside the direct-message layer across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and Roblox, flagging hostile contact before it reaches the child and escalating emergencies to the right authority, precisely targeting the abuse New York seeks to prevent without the collateral restrictions a feed-design mandate entails.
