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California passes law requiring ID checks for all operating systems | Governor Newsom signs bills to further strengthen California’s leadership in protecting children online (www.gov.ca.gov)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 5 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.

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[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 62 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

[–] RustySharp@programming.dev 33 points 1 month ago

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.

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