Erin 💽✨Everyone seemingly getting mad about systemd adding a completely optional date of birth field to user records that is, in reality, only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced, perhaps on machines administered by schools, or by people who want their computer to wish them a happy birthday.
Seachaint@erincandescent I don't think cute happy birthdays needed to be handled by systemd, and this is all done in the context of laws being pushed that would criminalise computer use without age verification. So I think now, and not later, is the reasonable time to push back on it.
@seachaint systemd maintains a standard for a user database format, because /etc/passwd is incredibly limited and lacking many fields you might want to store on a modern system.
It contains optional fields like a user’s e-mail address, “real name”, or details like identifiers of security tokens they might wish to use to unlock their account.
In this case they’re adding a definition of a dateOfBirth fields to a JSON map, and nothing more. In particular you will not find any particular age confirmation method here; it’s entirely up to self reporting by the system administrator(s)
Thomas@erincandescent @seachaint Collecting data is not innocent. Are they going to add citizenship next? Would they like to add a religion field too?