this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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California passes law requiring age verification checks for all operating systems | Governor Newsom signs bills to further strengthen California’s leadership in protecting children online (www.gov.ca.gov)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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AB-1043 "Age verification signals: software applications and online services."

Text https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Other info https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

California AB 1043 signed. Mandatory os-level, device-level, app store, and even developer-required age verification for all computing devices.

Edit: altered title from "ID check" to "Age Verification check"

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[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 61 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (19 children)

Read the link yall

The bill requires:

  • OSes to take user birthday during account creation
  • this info is binned into categories (<13, 13-16, 16-18, >18)
  • the category info must be made available to basically all software
  • software is supposed to use this data to age gate content but is not allowed to send this data to 3rd parties

What this bill does not do:

  • Your full birthday is specifically not to be sent to every application
  • OSes are not being asked to check your id it doesn’t say the OS should do anything to verify the birthday, just that it should record it
  • There isn’t anything to prevent you from entering 1/1/2000 instead of your real birthday

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.

[–] cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 days ago

No and if you dont see the problem, get a fucking mirror.

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