California introduces age verification law for all operating systems, including Linux and SteamOS — user age verified during OS account setup
California 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).
It says that OS developers must track users or be fined, so they will track users.
Explicitly bars OS devs from sending more data than explicitly necessary to meet 1
The statute does not define:
What counts as “minimum”
How necessity is measured
Whether “minimum” refers to data fields, granularity, frequency, or retention
Whether metadata (e.g., device ID, timestamp, API call logs) is included or excluded
This legislature calls App Providers and developers to track people and barely even gives lipservice to what is allowed.
We don’t want our OS’s tied to our identities. This does not explicitly forbid that
I already read it. That’s how i came up with what I wrote man.
You go re-read it and tell me
What counts as “minimum”
How necessity is measured
Whether “minimum” refers to data fields, granularity, frequency, or retention
They don’t cover shit about ANY of that.
It literally explains the minimum as asking the user for their age, DOB, or both. It then says delopers may not ask for more than the minimum data.
If this is confusing I don’t know what to tell you.