How is this good at all for a free society? You are basically making a "what about the children?" argument. its the parent job to protect their children. why should anyone suffer this b.s.?
replyWhy should it be law? I am a developer in California, and a long time Linux nerd. If I were to release a hobby on my GitHub for fun, without age verification, am I now subject to fines? Imprisonment? Why should their be a legal requirement?
replyAs with any law like this, it should apply to systems made for normal end-users with over some minimum number of users. If your hobby Linux distro picks up a million home users then yeah, you're responsible for making it suitable for purpose for as long as you're distributing it. It's the same with accessibility requirements, safety requirements, labor laws, etc.
replyIf California starts knocking on the door of random distros and hobby OSes designed for power users or servers with 2000 average monthly downloads then I'll go to bat defending them.
Though to re-iterate, I'm pretty sure the requirements here are for asking a user to set an age, not to do age verification, so if you did want to comply it would mean adding a Date field to your setup flow and then wiring that up to applications that ask for it.
All the better to do targeted advertisments and underdeveloped minds!
replyThis is exactly the sort of infrastructure that would make it super easy to pass a law banning tracking and advertising to minors. Once every platform can trivially detect when they should turn off the ads there's no reasonable counter-argument about privacy or feasibility.
replyFine by me... instantly setting my age to whatever it is that disallows all ads ;)
reply