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I Spoke To The Developer Of The Systemd Birth Date PR - YouTube
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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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What is the point of a field like this if you can literally put anything in it you want? Your not verifying anything. The next logical step is to add proof.
If you're a user that requires age verification (IE a child) then you cant just add it. Your parent will be the root user controlling your account.
That isn't the next logical step for systemd, which is what this post is about.
The reason systemd stores this information is that systemd stores user information and this is user information.
If some future application comes along that wants to require age verification and use that field to store the data, then you can simply choose to not install it. Problem solved.
Removing birthDate doesn't stop these programs from existing. If there isn't a birthDate field then they can simply decide that they're going to store the birthdate in the user's 'location' field instead and it would work perfectly fine. Are you going to remove the location field too? All of the text fields?
Adding a specific birthDate field is simply recognizing that this software exists (which, it does) and that systemd is the logical place to store user metadata (which it is).
If you don't like the software that will do age verification then don't install that software.