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You forget about sudo? If you give up the password, that’s on you. That’s the whole idea of letting the OS handle it. You aren’t trusting some other service with your info. It’s all on you if your kids get around it.

Complying would be installing back doors to id.me or some other such nonsense and the hell with that.

Yeah, cos the alternative is having to trust Facebook with even more sensitive data. I don't want to do that. They don't want that. It is possible for interests to align even between two groups that otherwise rarely agree.

I'll give another example of that. In Australia, the Greens are the main party for progressives. Unfortunately they rarely hold very much power compared to the centrist Labor and far-right Liberal National Coalition, but they do exist and have a few seats in Parliament.

In my state, there is currently a petition being circulated to ban advertising of gambling in government-owned assets. It is being supported primarily by two groups: the progressive Greens party, and the extremely socially conservative Christian lobby. I can't think of a single other issue right now where these two would agree, but they'll work together because they do agree on this issue.

I'm happy to agree with Facebook that age verification belongs locally, not via sketchy third-parties who then have to hold on to sensitive data and hope they don't get hacked. And not by uploading sensitive data directly to social media or porn sites who have no business holding on to my photo ID.

Ah but think of the positives - we can now get back the death videos and all the pushing of sex content if the producers can theoretically rely on age verification.

What part of "it's not a bad thing" did you not understand?

"Don't comply in advance" is an instruction not to comply with bad things in an act of appeasement or to try to curry favour with the totalitarians. Complying with an actual well-intentioned policy is not "complying in advance" in the way that phrase is intended.

signal political support for California's privacy-eroding, pearl-clutching bullshit

I dunno what's going on in California. To be quite honest I don't care what's going on in California, or anywhere in America, in this regard. The UK and my own country of Australia have introduced age verification laws recently. And to be frank, they're shit. Australia's law was rushed through Parliament with zero scrutiny and zero regard for the ramifications of the law.

And this feature? It would not comply with that law. Because our law actually requires some method of verification done by the sites themselves.

My interpretation of what's going on here is Linux would be showing the Australian government "hey look, we don't give a fuck what the law you wrote says because it's shit. We're doing something that achieves the outcomes you claim to want in a way that doesn't have the downsides of your shitty law."

I've been advocating for exactly what this guy did right here since November 2024, when the Australian government first pushed through its shitty law without regard for how the law actually worked. Because it's a good use of technology to achieve a well-meaning outcome, in a way that is well-considered rather than doing the laziest privacy-invasive method. If California has come up with a law that can be complied with in that way, I guess well done to them. I'm not changing my opinion on good policy just because someone I don't trust for unrelated reasons also agrees with it.

What points? All I've seen is people railing against the very idea that parents should be given tools that help.

as children defeat such weak measures all the time

It's actually not any weaker than the onerous privacy-invading options big tech is forcing on us regardless. It can be gotten around by accessing sites that don't enforce it, maybe. But a well-made parental control system could actually be far, far more effective. It could block installation of any app that doesn't comply, if the parents choose to enable that functionality. And compliant browsers could, if they wanted, rely on some other crowd-sourced list of sites to block access to sites that don't enforce it themselves.

Being based right in the user's operating system means that if it's well-designed, it maintains complete privacy and is as difficult to bypass as it's possible to devise. The only way I can think a well-designed system could be bypassed would be by the child installing their own separate partition or running a live-USB. There may even be ways that can be prevented; I'm not sure.

But frankly, at that point we're teaching the kids how to be comfortable doing things to take ownership of their own machines. And I see that as an absolute win.

Except that you're claiming it empowers tracking when it does no such thing. The server-side age verification that's happening already, and which this exists as an alternative to are tracking. This is a way of achieving a good outcome (children not accessing porn, and parents being given tools to help parent their children instead of big tech letting them roam free on their harmful addictive algorithms) without tracking.