This approach seems far better than the countless age verification methods being pushed on us: selfies, government-issued documents, zero-knowledge protocols (which inevitably become centralized), AI analysis, behavioral patterns, credit cards, etc. All of these violate privacy to a much greater degree, exposing us to identity theft, deepfakes, sextortion, tracking, and profiling by governments or anyone else.
This method only reveals your age—which is essentially what’s needed.
During OS installation or account creation, simply ask for username, password, and year of birth. A parent or guardian can easily handle this for minors. Look simpler than existing parental control tools.
If a minor reinstalls the OS, bypasses it, or uses a live OS… well, we can’t have full control—that would be a prison.
The best solution is for parents to do their job properly with support when needed. It’s strange that governments dismiss this approach.
I don’t really think this is the case at all… isn’t it likely they simply included a general umbrella definition so that they COULD apply it wherever they deemed necessary?
Something like a SteamDeck for example… but not a general Linux Desktop?
Many rules are made this way, but not enforced uniformly.
We’ve been through this before, Governments puts a law (eg: pirating is illegal) and we completely ignore it (Like using Tor). im pretty sure we will be seeing Cracked versions of distros pretty soon if they also start forcing documentation
i stand with @milikitato‘s view, it is better to use OS-based age verification after we’ve seen what happened with Persona. plus we wouldn’t have to provide personal documentation! and also im pretty sure the people making this law wouldn’t have the comprehension to to check every distro so we might be safe for a good while.
Hardly, if I’m 63 this year, then you can calculate how old I am in another 12 months.
How will ‘asking for the age’ work? I install KDE Plasma, it’s gonna ask me for what? I am in Thailand, so there’s no government ID for me - and I’m not sharing passport information…
Surely this could only be enforceable within California with California residents carrying Citizen cards for verification - anything outside that would be pretty much unenforceable.
Then what are they going to do, re-employ some ICE agents to become AGE agents and raid your house? Good luck with that…
They got lobbied because the Education system failed to raise good parents, which is a whole other can of worms.
we wouldn’t have Big Brother if we had Responsible Parentingthought in schools (even to those who wouldn’t be parents because they too need to learn how to act around younglings)
If that’s true, then it’s even more important not to show preemptive obedience. I still hope this will go away one way or another (a court of law ruling it unconstitutional, sudden onset of sanity, etc).
If this law holds up at all, I can see it apply to distributors who are doing business in the state of california. Who’s gonna sue KDE developers for not complying? Who are they going to sue exactly? KDE should not comply prematurely. It would set a dangerous precedent. California or other states all over the world could and would build upon this. If the next law from Germany says “connect the age indicator to some form of government ID or driver’s licence scan, build a database of users, and have it ready for inspection” will we comply? This is not a joke. German politicians are discussing real-name requirement for internet use right now. Other countries are going the same direction. Do not comply. Boycott/geoblock authoritarian countries if you have to.
I mean the entire premise of age verification actually doing anything useful is simply rubbish. We all know this. So this law is fundamentally nonsensical.
a regular user could much more easily lie about their age
I don’t think the law really has the goal of the age value being true, it’s legal coverage to put the legal responsibility of the lying on the applicant and not on the system owner. It’s a different version of the dumb “are you over 18?” question they put on adult sites.
So, their goal is to protect the kids online by essentially cordoning them off into the children’s table of the internet, and then punishing the ones who find ways around it. Yeah that’s not going to blow up in their face big time. Smart thinking guys. They’ve created Mar-a-Lago Elementary and are wondering why all the kids are skipping school.
Edit:
I mean, maybe, from the prospective of the law makers, they don’t know that a user can install their own operating system, and is trying to use this as a way to prevent people from falling into the dark patterns of big tech…?
…estimate the age of child users with a reasonable level of certainty appropriate to the risks that arise from the data management practices of the business or apply the privacy and data protections afforded to children to all consumers and prohibits an online service, product, or feature from, among other things, using dark patterns to lead or encourage children to provide personal information beyond what is reasonably expected to provide that online service, product, or feature or to forego privacy protections.
and maybe they just assume that all relevant consumer devices ship with a preinstalled operating system from the likes of Apple and Microslop and so forth… and don’t realize we exist…?
I mean I guess the take of these people being actively malicious against their own people dose not make any sense.
That’s the same BS excuse Google, Twitter and other big tech use for applying censorship in China and other countries ruled authoritative regimes. I can’t freaking believe you’re going along with this so easily. Of course you don’t have to comply with the laws you in principle disagree with, the opposite implies lack of moral stance. With US becoming increasingly more isolated on the world stage, thanks to unprecedented chaos Orange Pedo Guy is causing around the globe, I beg to differ. I love KDE, I’ve used it for about 15 years, but if you go down this the route of succumbing to Orwellian surveillance state, I’m out, along with my substantial regular donations, and I don’t think I’ll be the only one, a significant part of the OS community is saying resolute NO to this, and projects are beginning to line up to show where they stand. It’s good to know where everybody stands. After all, we’ve all got a choice.
I wonder, what about the German one? I can’t post the URL unaltered because the forum won’t let me link the article name since there’s “p orn” in it… lol.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Youth-Protection-States-Pass-P hello yes the forum isn't smart orn-Filters-for-Operating-Systems-11086768.html
I find the design proposal on https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/043510.html strange.
I don’t believe that the SetAge or SetDateOfBirth methods should be part of the standardized API. It should be entirely up to the package implementing the API to set the age or date of birth of users, rather than other programs. The package providing the functionality only has one purpose: to provide the API for the age range for reading. The package implementing the API should be able to decide for itself where to storage data, rather than forcing a tight integration with another package. Sticking to only the functional requirement helps against function creep.
I believe that the User field should be removed entirely. Applications requiring the API should only care about the current user who is logged in. The field is an unnecessary and adds extra complexity without any real benefit.
The AgeBracket should output a string, rather than a number. Numbers are not future-proofed against age bracket changes; strings are.
An error should not be thrown if the age bracket is unknown. Not all jurisdictions require the API to be implemented, but operating systems may choose to include an age verification package by default. People should be able to omit the field or remove files storing age verification data.
Any age verification package can return jurisdiction-specific age ranges when returning a sting value, rather than a numeric one, without having to formalize the exact return values. Only the syntax of the return values should be formalized:
>=a - <b : general are brackets
>=a: last age bracket
?: not required / unknown
For example:
>=0 - <13
>=13 - <16
>= 16 - <18
>= 18
While I agree that it’s best to wait for age verification laws to be challenged before implementing anything, there needs to be a fallback plan that can be quickly adopted by major software projects and “OS providers”.