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.”
these laws require a central user account data base. When you launch an app, the app dev is mandated to request a signal from the app store or operating system Provider, not operating system.
The average person has an online account tied to their devices with their info already. This allows a parent to set a kid’s age and the kid can’t change it. Google has it, for example
Most people I talk to in the Linux community think it’s something on their local machines because articles keep quoting people that didn’t understand that at the time. Since making those statements, they’ve fallen silent. Also the freedesktop.org wants nothing to do with implementing this
Here is a piece of the law that spells out what happens when you launch an application on your device:
1798.501
(b)(1)A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.
Not asking your computer/operating system. The have to ask the app store or OS Provider