How Linux and BSD Distros Are Responding to the New Age Verification Laws https://itsfoss.com/news/distros-response-age-verification-laws/

California’s new online safety bill, AB 1,043 (the Digital Age Assurance Act), adopts a declared age model for operating systems. Under the law, which is set to take effect on January 1, 2027, when a user sets up a new device, the operating system is required to ask for their age or date of birth. This declared age will be used to curate what’s available on the app store, and can be shared with developers on request to ensure age-appropriate experiences.

An article in PC Gamer points out that this “sounds incompatible with many of today’s open source software, including Linux.” The open source community is wrestling with the problem of how to comply with the laws while also not violating core privacy principles.

The piece muses on technical solutions, quoting Jef Spaleta, project leader for popular Linux distribution, The Fedora Project, who says “this might be as simple as extending how we currently map uid to usernames and group membership and having a new file in /etc/ that keeps up with age.”