AmoxtliCalifornia introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup
Many people here are going off on wild tangents over this. You should just read the law, it’s only a couple thousand words of quite plain English.
Many here have taken completely incorrect assumptions from the title. **This law is for developers, not users. **
Summary:
gasp
The only problem I have with this is that it should only apply to commercial software (app stores and OS). Libre/FOS software should not have to police ages on their app stores, due to their far reduced budgets (often zero), developer time, and the nature of the software being generally anti-centralized and anti-surveillance-capitalism. Though I’d be fine with it for FOSS software distributed via commercial app stores, as long as they gave a longer lead time to implement (EG a couple of years).
Im not sure I understand your point about this law being for developers not users.
The fines may only be applied to operating system developers for failing to implement these systems… but having those systems at all still drastically impacts end users in a negative way.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
1000%
And TIL the phrase “violent agreement” 😆