Good luck enforcing that on Linux.

Just ranting

I get that at least some amount of lawmakers may just really and truly want to protect children and jump to creating laws that involve lots of things that they have no real understanding. And blowback that can and will be created by hyper focusing on a micro level (even if they think they are thinking macro) points. But there are far more of them that just want to keep one-upping other lawmakers in being “the most proactive” or “tough on crime” compared to other folks in power because of all the money they get ever election cycle (which never end).

I know why it would be a massive shitshow (the “antichrist” crowd turns every little thing into a “sign”), but kind of wondering when they will just push for laws to put pet style GPS chips in all children at this point. I mean it isn’t really much of a jump that they could require phones used by children to be forced to have GPS (and data) be registered to state level tracking (just like all the stuff collected by NSA already). But that wouldn’t be enough for the one-upping shit, and GPS chips would be usable if the devices aren’t with the children (or ones that don’t have devices yet). All extreme levels of shit, but eventually seems like they would be the only levels that could “go further to protect children” at some point.

I really look forward to seeing all the “fuck privacy even if you don’t have children” crowd catch literally all possible bad things that their own laws create happen to them personally. We already know that basically all the previous efforts to have kids only versions of things end up just creating massive targets for the very predators to get to the kids. And that automated flags can turn into so much false reporting without any real ways for the flagged accounts to speak with actual people to correct those false reports (YT being a great example even without anything involving children).

The government already slashes funds for things that aren’t police/military (things like the already existing social services that are for kids/education/families never have money for even general staffing). And the private contracted (for profit) companies already find ways to make more than the government contracts by making paid tiers and constant ads. So those private entities shouldn’t be trusted with data on children in the first place.

Interesting, it’s vague, and obviously going to go through legal hurdles. Windows, Google, and Apple will just do it. Ubuntu might, but what about Debian, or any number of server OS’s? Will users need to verify their age logging into a server? What about forks? Forks of forks? OSes developed outside of the US?

Where this could be an opportunity, and hear me out, is that this could pave the way for privacy-friendly age checks to shut them up about “what about the children”. The bill says that all it needs to check is age - nothing else. If the OSS community can come up with a way to privacy-friendly validate age, then this whole thing could be solved. Websites wouldn’t need to store IDs, they could ask the browser who would check the OS. In fact, that might be the purpose of this bill, to curb all the “Just collect their IDs” with the websites. If the OS had a check stored securely that you’re over 18 and nothing else, then all other age checks could be cut.

Also interestingly, it reads like they might be angling against Microsoft and Google for collecting private information on minors because “We didn’t know they were minors, how could we?”.

I don’t like it one bit and it’s going to be completely unenforceable - and OSes like Arch will say “You can’t use this in California”, but if that’s the angle they’re trying to do, it might work.

You just know that when a bill is titled “Protect the little children from eternal suffering bill”, it’s gonna contain some real fucked up anti-privacy nonsense in it.

This is probably the most dystopian child safety bill so far.

Read the link yall

The bill requires:

• OSes to take user birthday during account creation
• this info is binned into categories (<13, 13-16, 16-18, >18)
• the category info must be made available to basically all software
• software is supposed to use this data to age gate content but is not allowed to send this data to 3rd parties

What this bill does not do:

• Your full birthday is specifically not to be sent to every application
• OSes are not being asked to check your id it doesn’t say the OS should do anything to verify the birthday, just that it should record it
• There isn’t anything to prevent you from entering 1/1/2000 instead of your real birthday

Honestly this doesn’t seem that bad to me. If anything it’s a little pointless. This style of age verification is basically universally already used. I guess you could read this as forcing OSes to have parental controls.

I do think there is a bit of a privacy issue in this information being shared with every program, but they attempt to minimize this using the binning (so ironically it really only hurts the privacy of teenagers since for adults it will just say >18), and this information is supposed to not be shared with 3rd parties (but we all know Facebook and Google are going to do whatever they can this info, pushing the limits of that part of the law, or just waiting to be sued and paying the fine when it happens).

I honestly think most Linux distros will just implement it.

Please update your title to remove the misinformation about the bill, specifically calling it “OS-level ID verification” is not even close. It’s not got anything to do with personally identifying information or any actual verification of age information.

It’s actually an incredibly privacy conscious method of doing what it is trying to do, which is to allow parents to set up a child’s account with their age information on a device and have that age bracket information passed to websites and applications. That way, it makes it harder for a child to bypass age-restrictions, but without requiring dangerous age verification methods such as ID or face scans.