I find that move extremely funny, since it's purely made for sensationalism and nothing else. I mean, if you hate how systems implemented age verification, then why don't you remove its identity verification too, i.e. also optional fields for stuff like your address an e-mail that most users don't even fill out.

There is no mechanism verifying what birth date you type in - you can type whatever date you want and systems doesn't care.

I'd say no matter where you stand with age verification, this is the best solution to handle the situation. After all, any and all age checks we have nowadays are a black box anyways. There is no real knowing how other systems are checking ages, and there is AFAIK no real government mandated rules on how it is verified. They could make you scan your ID's front, back, nuclear composition and dietary preferences and give you a result that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a proper age verification procedure.

If the government wants to introduce age verification, they have to do it themselves - build an API that handles the age verification, similar to how the digital ID in Germany works, as an example. If they want proper age verification, they also have to take the blame themselves if things go wrong.

Good luck maintaining it

None of the id fields in the systemd db are required to be filled. This is useless. Simply don't put any personal info in, and bam, you're already liberated, from laws that aren't even in effect yet!

There's no age verification in systemd. That field doesn't verify anything

Okay I've said this so many times but (open source) code is speech and thus protected by free speech laws. Also idk if anyone's noticed but it's pretty obvious ID verification is for mass surveillance and obbo purposes. Now why would this apply to software that we already know doesn't spy on you? Until now, proprietary software and big tech platforms already spied on you, but it could - to an extent be pseudonymised. This isn't about spying on people, they already do that, it's about removing pseudonymisation - instead of your data being stored under: User #2044820 it'll be your full govt name and address leaving no room for doubt or plausible deniability.

It is by every metric, useless to provide ID verification for software that collects no data, at best it would just give them a better idea of the demographic. Also it's literally open source, the GPL prohibits disallowing people from forking/editing it and it prohibits restrictions on the way in which it can be edited, which is legally binding.

I'm not into this, but is it the nerd version of releasing forks and torches?

They literally just added a field in the JSON schema to support a birth date field which is completely optional and has no relevance on the project. People are so dumb.

if there is no malicious intent in adding this, they really should learn to read the room.

1. Fork a project that you have a problem with;
2. Write a strong worded manifesto;
3. Revel in those sweet sweet internet clicks;
4. Try to gather a team of seasoned engineers to keep and evolve the project;
5. Most likely fail, look for the next controversy, repeat.

The DOB field is different from name and address because it is a fixed attribute that never changes. Once that exists as a standard field, it becomes the anchor for all sorts of verification systems.

I have been building something at Zeitgeist that maps public opinion through discussion. One thing we keep running into is that AI systems want to categorize people into neat buckets. They will say "users under 18" vs "over 18" and move on. But real human disagreement does not work that way. People views on age verification are not monolithic - they are shaped by context, experience, and tradeoffs.

We are seeing this play out everywhere now. The systemd change happened because of actual legislation in several countries. It is not theoretical anymore. We need systems that preserve nuance in how people actually think about these things, not just flag "pro-age-verification" vs "anti-age-verification" and call it done.

I can see it's just an optional text field but the ick isn't optional. It's leaning towards submission in comparison to resistance. I'm hoping such laws get repealed, rather than spread.

Reject the age verification.

You probably want to mod it so that whenever (in future) it's called on to send an age to an external service then it just supplies a new randomised dob or age. Another good feature would be to make sure that the OS exposes any such checks to the user.

Called it

This is bs ...

Instead of fighting the laws and the people behind it, 'we' (as in 'the community') infight about some minor commit?

If the reason is data privacy, why not also remove 'realName', 'emailAdress' and 'location'? 🙄