this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
106 points (95.7% liked)
Linux
12879 readers
653 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Of all terrible proposals coming up in this period, I'm still more-or-less ok with this system because the administrator is still in full control to set whatever date they want, and the field is entirely optional.
They call it "age verification" in the aricle, but there's no 3rd party "verification" whatsoever. It's just a field for the user birth date saved in the user metadata. This is IMHO acceptable because it doesn't force anybody to provide IDs or personal information to some random shady company.
I think calling it "age verification" is a bit confusing and will make people unhappy by default, but might be a smart move to make it compliant with the new laws coming out in this period (the user age was "verified" by the system administrator, after all).
Yep. Its honestly mild as hell.
Essentially legislation that says:
Its just a standardized system that should have been done ages ago, but was not a priority for standards orgs, so none stepped up - so legislation appeared.
I strongly argue that it should only apply to commercial OSes and app stores though - as they're the ones that primarily cause issues these laws intent to address.
Linux and FOSS have been caught in the crossfire in a privacy and personal data battle they were not involved in.
The boiling pot goes up 1C, then another 1C
The legislation is entirely to allow Facebook to get away with harming minors, so I wouldn’t call it mild in any sense of the word.
Good points. It's like websites with an age-gate: technically they're trying to keep out users under a certain age (usually minors), but there's no verification.
But we all need to remember that "protecting the children" and clutching our pearls is still not a good reason to let world governments and giant corporations create laws, demand our papers, keep massive databases of our data, and tie our real-world identities to our online ones. It would be the end of anonymity online, it will get hacked, and they will use it for evil...
They don't call the systemd change "age verification" in the article.
In fact, they specifically make the point that it isn't.
They do use it in the title though (the title on this post was auto-generated from the article, I didn't pick it out.)
I agree with OP, it's not really age verification in the sense we've been seeing in the news, but it IS a step in the direction of following the letter of the law without intrusiveness.
The title says it is bringing the option for age verification, not that it is age verification.
Good point, I stand corrected.
If, and I do stress if applications require it filled out, there are simply going to be an awful lot of epoch birthdates in their data. And frankly a lot of people, myself included, who will step up and write replacements to these applications in order to give a giant middle finger to authoritarian governments/companies as a result.
It's very mild this, and as it has no 'verification', it's just a meaningless string of numbers.