Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

: Don't celebrate yet – more states are considering them

The Register
I really don’t understand what the value they see in putting age checks on operating systems. Like where is this coming from? Who whispered in their ear that OS age checks are something that need to be done?

From what I can tell, the ‘age’ part is misdirection. They want to restrict computer use to the “good” people, to make it “safer”.

Using age restrictions first allows legislation to be passed “for the children” using the idea of potential harm to theoretical children. However, in practice, legislators expect the implementation of the age check to be capable of checking anything else they want to about your identity, as a prerequisite for access. Probably using a combination of face scans and ID scans.

I don’t even understand what good this is. what does this do for them? The government has a database of identities and now it’s going to have a database of identities with computers? for what
It isn’t even just the government, big tech wants this too. They want to be able to track everything you do with your computer, and that’s more easily achieved if OS level identification is required. Big tech wants it for data harvesting and ad targeting, the government wants it for surveillance and narrative control. The end goal is government verified digital ID that will be required to use any operating system. There will be no anonymity anymore. This creates a panopticon effect in which people police themselves because they know they are always being watched. Furthermore, the information you receive in your social media feeds and web searches can be silently curated based on what is known about your political attitudes. It can all be managed by AI.
they already have digital fingerprints. they don’t need OS level anything to do this
To an extent, yes, but they could do it much more easily and accurately if there was a unique, biometric identifier associated with all your actions across your devices which cannot be disabled.