Hi,
On 09/03/2026 10:44, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
On Mon, 2026-03-09 at 03:56 -0500, David C Rankin wrote:
This may end up being an interesting exercise to watch. Nothing short
of a war between the privacy advocates, and the advocates for the
protection of children. Not to mention the FOSS community's eagerness
to have more personal information captured in the OS -- and then by
what, systemd?
I can't resist saying more about this.
The questions would be
1. With an open source operating system, how can you ensure that a
security mechanism that performs age verification cannot simply be
bypassed before installing this operating system or using it for the
first time or each time you want to use it?
It would be possible to bypass this without cracking any ominous binary
blobs. This makes the whole thing even more absurd, especially for users
who use a distro that is not user-friendly but user-centric.
2. Who should verify and store the data? Should David, for example, hold
his ID up to a webcam and have a trusted user check it and store it in a
database?
3. I haven't read the law. Does every login have to be done by someone
above a certain age limit for younger users? Does it have to be a legal
guardian?
Please first read up about the topic instead of just making blind
assumptions and FUD. So if you wish to engage on this topic at least try
to be informed.
All that is needed is a way for the operating system to provide an age
(range) to an application / app store. Work for this is already underway
in GNOME / systemd for parental controls. [1] [2]
This is already wanted for parental control reasons unrelated to
California law.
Also note that the EU is working on age verification for applications,
and it seems other countries such as Brazil are too. [3]
So for this all seems to be inevitable and something distributions will
have to deal with.
[1] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922
[2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
[3]
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-european-union-mini-id-wallet
