[somat]

Here is the exact text of the california law, make your own opinion.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

What I got out of it was that an os has to provide an interface to applications so that if they make an age request(note that the law says nothing about when or what applications will make a age request) the os can provide something. and it has to provide an interface for the user to enter the information.

So when we map this requirement onto the mechanism of how the os provides information to applications. and how users set up the system. I have come to the conclusion that compliance on a unix-like platforms is as simple as

echo ${AGE_CATEGORY} > ~/.config/ca_ab_1043

Then the program can get the age category anytime it wants to. the user is able to put this information in at account setup just like the law asks using an accessible interface, the same interface everything else on a unix-like platform uses, the shell.

[object-a]

You’d need some script that updates the age category based on the user’s provided birthday (which is not shared with the applications) but otherwise yeah

[somat]

No you don't, the compliant user will up date this information as necessary.

[object-a]

The law says the user provides the birthdate or age and the bracket is derived from it

[Retr0id]

I wish the legislators thought about the privacy implications of this, because anyone can learn your birthday by watching when the category changes.

[object-a]

The brackets are a few years wide, so it could take a bit of waiting. But yeah I’d consider setting a slightly different day/month for a child if I was paranoid.

I guess you could also make the bracket selectable instead of requiring the age

[akersten]

> The brackets are a few years wide, so it could take a bit of waiting.

There are millions of people moving between the proposed age brackets every day. This is a DoB-gifting firehose to ad tech.

[object-a]

Ad tech doesn't need this feature to know roughly how old you are.

[crooked-v]

Also, various sites were already legally required to gather this information anyway to know if someone is over or under 13.