userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd
github.com
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...

Not to mention that they locked the unpopular pull request from reactions.

  • infeeeee ( infeeeee@lemmy.zip ) 
    19·
    7 months ago

    No they haven’t, they added a field where a user can store their birthday, as required by law in parts of the US.

    Or do you recommend them to ignore the law, and jeopardize the whole project? Do you want linux get banned in California? You are mad at the wrong people

  • Mikina ( Mikina@programming.dev ) 
    12·
    7 months ago

    Would it be possible to add a layer on top that shows you when an app requests it, and shows you a checkbox about what you want it to report? Or just block the call as not supported.

    Faking it to be child (or just random with each request) until you need a higher number could mess up with advertisers and in general fingerprinting.

    • spectrums_coherence ( spectrums_coherence@piefed.social ) English
      12·
      7 months ago

      I think it is accessed through xdg-protal, and the usage tracking and permission etc. likely happen at that layer.

      The xdg-desktop-portal project is adding an age verification portal (flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#1922) that needs a data source for the user’s age. userdb already stores personal metadata (emailAddress, realName, location) so birthDate is a natural fit.

  • berty ( berty@feddit.org ) 
    10·
    7 months ago

    This is all wrong to me, schools and parents should educate their kids and take interest in what they are doing online, it shouldnt be forced by the government.

  • LostWanderer ( LostWanderer@fedia.io ) 
    9·
    7 months ago

    Oof, I might have to figure out another distro that doesn’t use Systemd, given that it is very common to find on most Linux distros. I wonder if I will jump into the deep end and use FreeBSD or perhaps learning NixOS to declare the banishment of Systemd from my system.

      • LostWanderer ( LostWanderer@fedia.io ) 
        2·
        7 months ago

        I’ve been reading about that myself…There are people trying to build an alternative init system for NixOS, looks like that effort is a long battle. FreeBSD could be a very hit or miss prospect for me, as I’d need to confirm the hardware support before making the jump. I have a 2021 PC, my general hardware would be supported in theory…The NVIDIA and Wayland support would make or break my choice, as I don’t want to use smelly X11. It’s time to move on from that antiquated display server.

      • _‌_反いじめ戦隊 ( AntiBullyRanger@ani.social ) English
        2·
        7 months ago
        1. Read my bio before you proceed: I don’t want Zionist interactivities.
        2. I am not going to play a game of false equivalences.
        3. As a black anarchist, why do I care about these pretentious “fields”? I can remove them at the editor phase before I compile.
        4. Do you no longer compile your own distros to defeat the trust problem?
        • Senal ( Senal@programming.dev ) English
          4·
          7 months ago

          I’m not even who you’re replying to but this is too interesting not to at least try to ask.

          As this is probably going to be our first and last interaction I’ll preface this by saying we probably share a lot of the same values but it seems our approaches are different.

          So here goes.

          1. That’s a hard pass from me. As a concept i mean.

          If you require me to read a set of rules to interact with you that’s an immediate red flag for me, regardless of how reasonable they are.

          I’m not suggesting you stop requiring them, i’m just saying i’m also free to ignore them.

          That being said i did actually read them on this occasion, i have no compulsion to abide by them, it just so happens that they mostly align with how i interact in general. That probably doesn’t seem like much of a distinction, but it is to me.

          As a side note, I’m a stickler for word choice and a solid 90% of people i’ve ever interacted with who claim to dislike pedantic grammar police are actually salty because they are being called out logical incorrectness in their word choice or sentence structure.

          This is purely anecdotal and i am in no way accusing you of this, but for me it’s an orange flag to see something like that.

          1. That’s fair, i’d expect nothing less.

          2. This is the interesting one, i don’t disagree on the principle but i’m interested to see how far through this you have thought.

          As i said to the person i replied to, the issue here isn’t the field itself so much as the intention behind it.

          If you’re far enough down the technological self reliance rabbit-hole to be compiling your own OS then you probably aren’t too fussed about dropping a few services if they mandate age verification, (the third party kind, not solvable by self compilation).

          As a hypothetical. let’s assume somebody technically competent (but common sense deficient) has a visit from the good idea fairy and convinces someone in power to mandate age verification at the ISP level.

          Is that a “stop using the internet” kind of moment or a “pirate ISP” kind of thing, perhaps a Cuba style local internet type deal or something else entirely ?

          1. That’s a big ask for the everyday consumer, as it stands at least.

          Does this way of thinking also address trust in the code itself or does that require you to read and understand all of the code being compiled, including libraries and other supply chain artifacts ?

          Does it extend to hardware as well, with things like IME, PSP and perhaps DASH all the trust in the world won’t counter internal hardware based attacks ?

          Not that i’m saying to do nothing, just wondering where you sit on this subject.