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On the one hand, I'm absolutely against blanket age verification laws like this one, think there are better ways to solve the stated problem, and believe that the current crop of legislation is being pushed by bad actors for nefarious purposes by means of pandering to public mania.

On the other hand, I do appreciate that a possible unintended consequence of the out provided by (5)(b)(I) could be that PII (along with user generated content in general) becomes similarly radioactive to if the US had passed a GDPR equivalent. Either that or it's used as a justification for every single online service to require government ID in order to interact with it "because liability". Unfortunately I assume the latter is somewhat more likely at this point.

Also is it defined precisely what it means to "process users' personal data"?

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> there are better ways to solve the stated problem

Call your representatives. There is overwhelming demand for age gating social media (based on, honestly, good evidence). This will be implemented based on who calls in. If the status quo of technical people being hopelessly nihilistic continues, it will be written in the stupidest ways possible.

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Of course we could make predatory algorithms illegal. Or just algorithmic timelines/discovery algorithms.

Nah. Can’t stop the money. Let make brain destroying scams and ad spam legal as long as you’re over 18.

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TL;DR We need age verification laws to prevent minors from accessing the addictive stream of toxic sludge rather than outlawing its manufacture and distribution.
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It's always written in the most midwit way possible, then, once predicted failure happens it's patched up to be slightly better. That's the default assumption for most of the things.
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> based on, honestly, good evidence

Can't say I agree. Notice that the proposed legislation isn't specific to social media. Rather it's explicitly advanced in support of Colorado's data privacy laws as they apply to minors.

There's evidence of lots of different issues, a few age related but most not. Adults certainly aren't immune to adversarial algorithms and dark patterns and the practical need for privacy isn't limited to children. It's more that we only seem to be able to achieve broad consensus to add additional regulations where it concerns children.

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That wording could be interesting, because it's ambiguous if free is applicable to the repository or the project. Presumably, the latter. This means you could absolutely do source-open but not open-source and still get around it.
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Well it says code repository not artifact repository. But it doesn't prohibit obfuscation or transpilation and more generally doesn't appear to specify anything beyond "free and publicly available". I really get the feeling that the people who wrote the law don't have a clear idea of what they're trying to say here and that any court decision is going to be a roll of the dice.
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