AdfichterDo the age verification laws of california, UK, New York (demanding operating system provider to ask/verify for the age) etc. affect EVERY user of android and iOS global wide? when you have iOS app store switzerland...that means apple will ask the swiss users too?
floyd aka floyd_ch@adfichter usually not as they are quite good at applying rules locally... but you never know. IIRC they even excluded Switzerland for rules only enforced by courts in the EU (was it the right of being able to sideload apps?)
@floyd I see, but they apply regional app store policies...but on a operating system level (apis), dont you think this will be deployed for all users in the end?
@adfichter the system level apis will be there, that doesn't mean they work if they don't want them to (e.g. depending on the regional settings). As always, we are just receiving puppets of whatever big tech decides as long as we use their things and we don't fight them with privacy laws
Siguza@floyd @adfichter Apple has historically used 3 mechanisms for geofencing that I'm aware of:
- Region Code. This tells you where the device was sold, and is static info associated with the device.
- App Store Region. This is tied to your Apple ID and can be changed, though there are cooldowns, and AFAIK some regions have further requirements (e.g. China requires a Chinese phone number).
countryd, a system daemon introduced some time ahead of the EU Digital Markets Act coming into effect. This takes in various sources of information (location data, country codes broadcast by WiFi access points and cellular towers, etc.) and gives you a best guess as to which country the device is actually currently in (and has been in for some past time frame).
Sometimes they use just one, sometimes a combination of those. But there's a good amount of things that change solely based on your physical location. One example is apps installed from 3rd party EU App Stores, which stop working if you've been physically outside the EU for some time. Another example is the mandatory shutter sound for Japanese iPhones. I own a second-hand phone that was originally sold in Japan, and after a clean restore it makes a shutter sound on camera use, but after some time (I think 2 weeks) of operation outside of Japan, that behaviour stops.
As for age range APIs, Apple Developer documentation has this to say:
Based on the person’s response, the system returns their shared age range with a lowerBound and upperBound, or if they’re in a nonregulated region, the system can return AgeRangeService.Response.declinedSharing.
This heavily suggests that they won't force age verification on users in regions where the law does not mandate it. What exactly happens when you travel between regions with different laws on this remains to be seen.
