Possibly linuxYou guys fell for clickbait
irelephant [he/him]Storing a users birthday is useful metadata anyway. I’m surprised it wasn’t stored before.
The age isn’t verified is any way. You can set it to the 1800s for all it cares
Opisek
Delilah (She/Her)Implement it as a s64 instead of a u64. Ugh, honestly. Back when it was a 32 bit integer it made sense to make it unsigned because we’d have run out of numbers by now otherwise. But as of the advent of 64 bit unix time values there’s really no reason not to implement it as a signed value smh
It is stored as a json date string
RustyNovaYeah like the email address and the full name of the user.
… What do you mean it’s blank for 99% of users?
driving_croonerEmail address and name are actually useful for network environments of a system admin needs to know who is the user behind a process or something. How old the user is is complete useless.
KogasaAnd how is it useful then? Parental controls have existed for decades and you never had to give your age to Facebook, who is the main proponent of these laws in the US and has poured millions of dollars into their creation.
This isn’t about protecting kids. It’s about adding an additional fingerprint companies and governments can use to track and identify you and what you do with your system.
Providing a place to store and read data for minimal, nominal, non-invasive compliance with legislation so that people can protect themselves without harming anyone else
Things I have never said anything about:
- Giving your age to anyone
- Laws in the US
- Protecting kids
- Fingerprinting
bootlegI have mine set ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Found the 1%!
You could also just not set it instead of using a nonsensical date
WraithGearyour argument is an oxymoron. if the data is useful meta data, but the user can just put what ever they want as the date then it’s not storeing useful data. and that means it should not exist.
unless the point is to use it in the future where the user can’t enter what ever they want and thus legitimizes all the commotion.
The point is to comply with the letter of a shitty law and avoid volunteer projects getting killed by lawsuits, while being useless for tracking purposes.
This law was written by Microsoft lobbyists so they can sue desktop Linux out of existence, and this PR prevents that.
This law was written by Microsoft lobbyists so they can sue desktop Linux out of existence, and this PR prevents that.
How would they be able to sue systemd? Genuine question. As i understand it, it is a local law. How could they force open source projects to comply? If I am located in Europe, for example, how would they even try to sue me by “breaking” the law of an american state? And how would they stop people frlm still using the “illegal” software?
then if it could be left blank or not a verifiable date… it would not comply with the law making its existence…. worthless. unless it is to make it mandatory in the future
The law said the OS must have a method to enter an age at account creation and an API for applications to query it. The systemd PR satisfies that, so the SPI and anyone representing a distro that uses systemd is off the hook legally.
so the second step in enshitification then. seems to me nipping it in the bud seems the better play. best to just slap a “not in california” sticker on it and provide it the same as always.
at this point i dont treat peoples invocation of the slippery slope fallacy as coherent or honest based on historical evidence
You can also store an email there, so it can be found by other programs, but you can also leave it blank, or enter a fake email if you don’t want your email to be stored.
Given the open nature of Linux, I find it hard to believe they can lock it down like that.
How is that useful information? To what purpose?
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠Auto-filling those “you must be at least X old to access this content” inputs could be one? Eg Steam could skip that page directly when accessing 18+ games.
I suppose you could ask the same for the realName and location fields that are already in systemd.
Lorem Ipsum dolor sit ametThere are jurisdictions where Steam has to explicitly ask every time you open an age-gated page, that’s why they do it and haven’t stored it before. That’ll presumably not change.
They ask each time because they don’t want to store the data themselves if they don’t have to. With this, they wouldn’t have to.
Name and email are useful for network admins to know what user is responsible for what process and location is used for timezone configuration. Autofill information can be get from the browser. What is next, systemd asking for credit card and full address?
Samskara- Congratulate the user on their birthday.
- recommend age appropriate software for communication, learning and games.
- statistics on the demographics of the user base
Don’t forget the personalized ads! 🫠
Drunk & Rootcompamys who want to de-microslop and still need feilds like that for whatever purpose
RouthinatorAnother datapoint for fingerprinting.
So don’t provide it or give it a fake value.