people on reddit are doing a whole lot of yapping about age verification in Linux

I would generally agree that the whole approach of these laws is total dogshit and clearly a wedge issue to enable stricter surveillance laws in the future

at the same time though, the actual implementation and potentially having a portal which exposes the users age bracket seems totally reasonable as a way to implement parental controls... I'm also not totally against holding service providers to higher standards for data processing when it comes to minors, and hey if they're doing that why shouldn't adults get the same treatment?

what im totally miffed about though is why the fuck would you get mad at systemd for adding a birthDate field to userdb, what would you have them do? Would you rather every desktop environment had its own way to store this data??

An XDG portal for this also means you can *trivially* write a stub that always identifies you as an adult or even lets you pick per-app (heck maybe per website! that might be the new cursed way of avoiding trackers under late stage capitalism)

and yeah it sure would be shit if we get real-id laws in a few years, but systemd or XDG standing on "principle" and refusing to implement this API is absolutely not going to lead to better outcomes for anyone. The last thing we want is for users in certain regions to wind up relying on implementations maintained by distros or random individuals, if we need to have this crap the least we could ask is that it's maintained by established and trusted people in the open source community!