Comment by noosphr

3 hours ago

Just remember that systemd added age verification in Linux without anyone asking.

There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.

9 comments

noosphr

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Grombobulous  2 hours ago

The age verification API in operating systems is a really good idea for privacy and parental control, so long as it doesn’t require literally collecting your ID (it doesn’t).

Look at it from the perspective of a parent giving a device to a kid. Before, you’d have to deal with a maze of blocking content. You’d have to allow/blocklist a huge number of apps and services manually. If your kid discovers some new one you or your blocking service has never heard of, they’ve gotten around your parental control wishes.

With the age verification API, you just set the age in the OS (and lock it down with MDM or whatever) and now all the apps and websites have to respect it and act accordingly.

Your kid can’t just make a new account or download another browser or do some other crazy workaround to get around your restrictions. That setting is there at the OS level.

  • noosphr  14 minutes ago

    That's great. Now that you have all the infrastructure in place the next request by the government will be a felon flag. You already have everything there, what's the big deal?

  • Scaled  40 minutes ago

    A child mode flag is fine. But a birthdate is a recipe for data collection and fingerprinting. And with Google, we're seeing a full verification requirement flag that means people have to scan identity documents or face pictures. It's a slippery slope.

rrego  2 hours ago

Its just a system that optionally exposes a birthday read from a json db. You don't have to use it, and you don't have to use applications that rely on it. And if you are going to use applications that have an age verification, this is a pretty serviceable standard.

I don't understand the uproar. Systemd isn't perfect but it gets so much hate for the value it provides

  • noosphr  2 hours ago

    Why doesn't it do the same for sex, gender, religion, race, sexuality, felon etc.?

    Those are also just fields, and there's incoming laws in countries that target them. No internet for unsupervised women for example. You wouldn't want to break usability for the fine government servants of Afghanistan would you?

    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r  4 minutes ago

      You can make any argument you want if you completely change what we are talking about.

      “What if instead of a user agent string, HTTP headers contained a string of your DNA, or a count of all the women that’ve ever rejected you for trying to get them to install Gentoo?”. Time to boycott web browsers I guess! even though none of it is mandatory! You’re really asking for someone to condescendingly send you the Wikipedia page for the slippery slope fallacy. I’m not going to be the one to do it, but I came close.