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Inside the Systemd Age Verification Debate: Developer Responds to Criticism (itsfoss.com)

submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@europe.pub to c/linux@programming.dev

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Dylan M. Taylor is not a household name in the Linux world. At least, he wasn’t until recently.

The software engineer and longtime open source contributor has quietly built a respectable track record over the years: writing Python code for the Arch Linux installer, maintaining packages for NixOS, and contributing CI/CD pipelines to various FOSS projects.

But a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight, along with a wave of intense debate.

At the center of the controversy is a seemingly simple addition Dylan made: an optional birthDate field in systemd’s user database.

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[-] andioop@programming.dev 10 points 1 day ago

One interesting thought I’ve had is actually that if we strip this signal to websites/apps and do not report an age range at all, but the vast majority of users DO, that actually gives us a more unique and trackable browser fingerprint.

As someone who is not a fan of adding the age field I'm curious what people think of this.

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 8 points 1 day ago

This is stupid. We block fingerprinting.

Just because some people are fingerprint able doesn't mean all of us should suffer and bend at the knee to unjust laws

[-] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 7 points 18 hours ago

You can't really "block" fingerprinting. You can obfuscate it a bit, but the fingerprinting process happens server side, not on your device. So whether or not your system sends whatever age verification signal becomes a part of its fingerprint.

[-] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 1 points 17 hours ago

It's not just server-side: A lot of fingerprinting happens client-side, for example using a canvas to check what features your graphics card supports. You can see this in action via services like https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ or https://amiunique.org/

[-] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

That's not the fingerprinting happening client side, that's just information supply. Fingerprinting is about what the server does with that information.

[-] Zink@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

Yeah, but the countermeasures are client-side because that's what you can control. And some kind FOSS devs out there make it easy to start somewhere decent.

Sent from my LibreWolf

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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026

113 points (91.2% liked)

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