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:

Requires OS devs ask for DOB, age, or both at account creation time.

Requires an API that allows app store devs to request this age data for the account. At minimum this must specify the account is a member of one of these categories: ‘user under 13, user over 13 and under 16, user is over 16 and under 18, user is over 18’.

gasp

Explicitly bars OS devs from sending more data than explicitly necessary to meet 1 (hint: photo ID, facial recognition).

Explicitly bars app devs recieving the data from requesting more data from the OS nor the App store.

Bars app stores from using the data for any other reason and specifically calls out anticompetitive practices.

Bars app store and OS devs from sharing this data with any third party for any other reason than to comply with this law.

Has injunctions and civil penalties of $2500 (max per user) affected by negligent violations (eg a child account is served adult content), and $7500 (max per user) affected by intentional violations.

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.

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?