A Plea To Devs Against OS Age Verification

General
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I want everyone to think back through the last couple of election cycles. Do you remember when everyone in the privacy community was being called paranoid for saying health/sports/period app data shouldn’t be shared for advertising or any other purposes? Now, do you remember the scramble to scrub your health/sports/period apps because you were scared the Project 2025 people were going to use the data to target you?

Was anyone paying attention when the UK’s Online Safety Act mandated 3rd party age verification?

How long do you think it will be before Linux’s proposed “Self Attestation” solution to comply with American states’ OS verification proposals will die under quiet, piecemeal amendments that mandate all users must age verify their OS through a 3rd party provider like their Microsoft account, or their Google account, or their Apple ID?

Do you really think those various state governments won’t bend to pressure from the major MAGAF (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook) corporations when they say “Self Attestation isn’t good enough. We need to be the arbiters of age verification to use the OS or access the internet”?

I recognize there will be plenty of people who say things like “It’s just a simple system flag. You’re making a slippery slope argument.” and I understand, but that’s a lazy way of ignoring the trends happening in regulatory bodies around the world.

You can’t take back your privacy once you punch holes in it, CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) is the perfect proof of that. If you think legislators can be trusted to stop at a Self Attestation flag, then you haven’t been paying attention to the last 10 years of mass surveillance developments.

Please, stand up and declare your Linux distro won’t comply with these new laws. Linux has always been the freedom option.

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This recent “protect the children” pretext has continued for the last 10 years or thereabouts but mass surveillance development has been strong for the last 30 years. Looking at just US law, CALEA was passed into law in 1994, over 30 years ago, and the Patriot Act in 2001. Social media and surveillance capitalism, and the dangers of all this data floating around, have made substantial headway over the last 20 years. People are ignoring decades of history when they say nothing will go wrong with collecting personal data.

I worry systemd’s merging of birthDate may be a mistake that will result in a snowball into far worse erosion of software freedom and our right to run the software we want to run on the computing devices that we own.

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