this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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Privacy
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Read the link yall
The bill requires:
What this bill does not do:
Honestly this doesn’t seem that bad to me. If anything it’s a little pointless. This style of age verification is basically universally already used. I guess you could read this as forcing OSes to have parental controls.
I do think there is a bit of a privacy issue in this information being shared with every program, but they attempt to minimize this using the binning (so ironically it really only hurts the privacy of teenagers since for adults it will just say >18), and this information is supposed to not be shared with 3rd parties (but we all know Facebook and Google are going to do whatever they can this info, pushing the limits of that part of the law, or just waiting to be sued and paying the fine when it happens).
I honestly think most Linux distros will just implement it.
Yeah, no
First off, this is just another step, and if you believe it's the last one then I have a nice bridge to sell you
Secondly, this won't work in practice. Software is being developed all ove the world by single nerds to scientists to little kids, to small software companies to huge software multinationals with hundreds of thousands of developers.
99.9% of the world doesn't have these rules and won't give a shit about what California wants. Do you believe that the app developed by some random kid in a random country will start checking age just because newsom wants it? Ok Boomer.
And IF this system allows you to put in whatever date, then what's the point, beyond some security theater?
This bill is absolute horse shit and won't go anywhere because this is not how the world works. This will likely end with citizens in California having a really really tiny amount of software available to them legally
Slippery slope fallacy. This law is basically just asking for a more unified and organized version of how we already check for age verification (which is every individual app or website asking for your birthday). If there was anything more than that I’d agree with you. I do agree that it’s annoying this is coming in the form of a law instead of an addition from Apple that they use in marketing that gets others to follow suit. I think that would have been a healthier way for this sort of organization to happen.
That being said, I do agree with you that the potential “next step” of asking the OS to verify your age would be an issue.
They already have to select what age range the app is for when they submit it to Apple or Google, and it’s Apple or Google that will have to make changes to comply with this law. If they aren’t distributing through an “app store” there is nothing the 3rd party developer needs to do or worry about according tot his law. However, I am curious how this will end up being applied to command line tools and package managers.
I agree, except it could be a form of parental controls. One thing I really don’t like about this law is I think the parents should decide what content is appropriate for their child, rather than the App Store. But not having any validation both puts the control back in the parents hands to some extent, while also making sure the law stops short of becoming a serious privacy and security issue.
Considering most of the biggest software companies in the world have offices in or are based out California, that’s simply not true. Apple, Google, and Microsoft will all comply, regardless of how reasonable the rules are. At best they would fight it in court.
I doubt anyone is planning to sue open source OS developers over this, but honestly the changes it asks for are pretty small, so I expect most linux distros will follow suit anyway.
Ofc I don’t think there is anything California could do to enforce this on FOSS software in any practical way, if it came to that.
That's not the slippery slope fallacy. Are you operating under the assumption that any sequence of events and projection of a future step is an example of the slippery slope fallacy?
We use 1/1/1970, the Unix epoch.
Wild! I am exactly the same age as the Unix Epoch.
Are you serious?! Mad jealous as I missed it by a year.
How cool! :)
How surprising that's my birthday too!
A state governor doesn't get to decide what kind of data libre software must or must not collect.
Correct, it takes a whole process and a bunch of politicians to write a law like this.
Even with binning, it doesn't prevent the date from being learned. All an application would have to do is ask for the bin every day. On the day it changes you learned their birthday. It only works for <18s, but isn't that specifically who they're saying they're trying to protect?
Yeah this is a real issue.
The smallest window for binning is 2 years and you would need another identifier to compare it against for any meaningful data gathering. If the law also provides penalties for gathering that type of telemetry on minors then it should be solid.
If it does that, sure. It would create penalties at least.
You wouldn't need another identifier though. On your 16th birthday, for example, your age range changes from <16 to >16. If the application checked every day and recorded it, then they would then know your birthday. The bins are larger, but switching bins is by the day. It doesn't matter how large the bins are at that point.
As a parent, I reckon a voluntary system like this (if I understand correctly) could be very handy. I could create a child account and automatically get age gated content for it.
And when said child is smart enough to circumvent the system, then they deserve whatever content they manage to get their hands on. I'd be so proud.
But I'm sure capitalism would find a way to abuse and misuse the system for gains.
It's still pretty bad and senseless. We all know how antis, nazis and conservationists are: you given them an inch, they'll try to bite your entire arm off, not to mention leaving an infection behind.
No and if you dont see the problem, get a fucking mirror.
Would Linux be required to though since it's free open source software? Windows I can see because it's a product, but Linux isn't.
I think any used in an official capacity (think enterprise facing software like Redhat), might, but for anything not used at a company level would be both impossible to enforce and unlikely to be audited.