Comment on California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup

• pulsewidth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Many users below are going off on rants about the police state fining them as end-users for user breeches (which is not any part of this law).

  Eg: greenahimada with 51 upvotes 2 down.

  For everyone trying to figure out how this would be enforced, it’s not about being proactively enforced. (and data collection is 99% of it)

  (Untrue)

  It’s about adding a double-tap “Well, these people also violated our age verification law, so they have to pay a fine,” added to any incident where it’s convenient to add this in. If a minor sends another minor a snap that would trigger CP laws, and one of the phones isn’t age verified correctly, fine to the parents and hands up in the air “We tried!” A minor is involved in torrenting movies? “Look, kids using illegal OS! Fine to the parents!”

  (Untrue)

  This is how laws work across a lot of corrupt developing countries.

  (… Rant continues).

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  • recked_wralph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    It isn’t mandating you affirm you’re older than 18. It’s asking explicitly for your age or your birthday.

    While the API then would take that data to transmit your age bracket to other systems.

    This might not be drastically burdensome on an individual workstation, I’ll stand corrected on that. And it’s not disclosing your actual birthdate to anyone either (though I still feel like it should be my choice whether or not to store that information on my personal device).

    In either case, we started with this “affirm your age” kind of law on various kinds of restricted websites (pornography and alcohol) and it’s easy to just lie. So now that is now morphing into more invasive age verification strategies.

    I view this law as easily circumvented theater that has the aside effect of being a slippery slope toward more aggressive anti-privacy systems in the future.

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• BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Go read the bill, particularly section 1798.501.b, 1798.502.a and b. Every developer of every application that can be downloaded from every package system MUST request your age bracket every time it is downloaded. And possibly every time it is launched. Basic utilities like ‘ls’ and ‘cat’, that pong example I pushed as a test, everything.

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  • recked_wralph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yeah I agree. And while the onus of that implementation is on developers to comply with the law, there is still negative impact on end users by creating those barriers.

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    • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I think we’re in violent agreement. It has a huge impact on both end users and hobbyists, and open source developers.

      I have some things I’ve developed in the classic “scratch an itch” approach and published for the handful of people who might use it. Now I’m liable for $2500-$7500 if a kid runs 10 lines of code?

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      • recked_wralph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        1000%

        And TIL the phrase “violent agreement” 😆

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