[terribleperson]

It's not OS age verification. You put in an age. It does not check whether it's real. It does not ask for an ID. That will get provided to app stores and probably browsers. It should be possible to spoof, too.

The primary use case of this, in my mind, is so that a parent can give their kid a PC and set an age on the user account, and that will result in them being unable to access a variety of content. Same thing for phones.

You are already being limited from accessing certain sites, because those sites are going to ask you to provide an ID. This is an alternative. It frees sites from having to request an ID to verify ages, because the age signal from the OS is legally sufficient. If I'm remembering what I read, it actually bars them from trying to determine your age in other ways.

edit: also, the signal passed from OS to software isn't even your age, it's one of four age groups. three under-age groups, and one adult group. It's not even meaningfully de-anonymizing!

[akersten]

> It's not even meaningfully de-anonymizing!

Until I poll the API every day until the bucket changes and now I know your exact birthdate. This law is not well-baked.

[terribleperson]

That's only going to apply to children, since there's only one age group for adults. There are definitely ways to solve that, too. It's not perfect, but I much prefer it to laws that force websites to ask for ID, or laws that do the same thing by making websites liable for children accessing them.

[themafia]

> It's not OS age verification.

The law specifically says your OS has to implement this API. It burdens my OS vendor with adding this. In this case, that's me, since I roll my own linux.

> That will get provided to app stores and probably browsers.

And how will they behave when my *OS* decides not to provide that signal? Which is what's going to happen since there's no way in hell I'm playing along with this garbage.

> is so that a parent can give their kid a PC and set an age on the user account

You're telling me there isn't any software which does this already? That are no third party packages a parent can buy to achieve this? Aside from that you're missing the blindingly obvious, without an audit trail, none of this matters. The third party software can actually do that. This cockamamie nonsense can't.

> You are already being limited from accessing certain sites

Oh yea? Which ones? From my perspective this has never happened.

> because those sites are going to ask you to provide an ID.

That's on them. That's a choice they have to make in the market. Perhaps that will allow a competitor to provide the same service, with better safety, and no ID checks. I will refuse to use any service that requires this.

If you have to show your ID to enter, that's a seedy place, and no where children should even be near. Why does social media need the same restrictions as pornography, drugs and hard liqour? Why is facebook even trying to profit off of this gap?

> If I'm remembering what I read, it actually bars them from trying to determine your age in other ways.

I believe you have remembered incorrectly. Please show me where this is a part of actual law. Then please explain to me why this is a good thing.

> the signal passed from OS to software

That's the problem. I don't care what it conveys or of it's "de-anonymizing" or not. If the software wants to know it can ask me directly. I don't want a law that requires my OS to provide _any_ information about me. Full stop.

It's just not _meaningful_. It does nothing. It does not protect children. It lets seedy backalley social media networks to profit off of their corruption. This is morally bent.

[bdangubic]

> Why does social media need the same restrictions as pornography?

this one is easy, as a parent I would rather have my daughter watch 10,000 hours of pornography than spent 1 hour on social media

[akoboldfrying]

Well, now I've seen everything.

[bdangubic]

social media is the root of most evil in the society at present, pornography is just a bunch of people fucking around. while neither is healthy, if you had to choose you are better off watching people fucking