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Comment by noosphr

6 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.

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noosphr

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Grombobulous  6 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.

  • Scaled  5 hours 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.

    • Grombobulous  3 hours ago

      The OS (I'll use systemd as an example) knows the birth date to determine whether or not you fall within an age range, but the applications are not offered the exact birth date by the API.

      Fingerprinting, perhaps it is a higher risk, the age range is being more directly provided. However, once a user is under 18 they're already triggering more stringent privacy laws and rules, an inability to enter into contracts, etc, and then when you get to the "over 18" age range it all becomes rather vague.

      Also, I highly doubt existing social media and Internet applications haven't already figured out most of their users' ages rather trivially using other means. Discord implicitly admits to this by saying that 90% of their users will not even be asked to verify their age. Discord already knows how old 90% of their users are with high confidence.

      Of course when we talk about someone like Google or Discord we are talking about a privately operated service provider and business, which is a separate issue than the OS-level privacy flag and is worth separating as a distinctly different concept. Private businesses were always able to scan your identity documents or face pictures if they wanted to do that as a prerequisite to using their products or services regardless of the law. In almost all states, this practice was never banned, and even in states with more stringent biometrics collection requirements like Illinois you can still do this as long as it's implemented in a legally compliant way.

  • noosphr  4 hours 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?

rrego  6 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  6 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 hours 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.

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