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.