Adding a birth date field to isn’t super alarming to me. More PII is bad obviously, but it’s not required, editable by an admin, and hidden in system logs. Whatever this field will (or won’t) do, the effects are already achievable through user and group permissions.
If you read the discussion on that pull request, you’ll see there’s a ton of interest from the community in ways to privatize this, and I have a lot of faith in developers to reroute around stupidity.
The real danger comes from how it’s used in the front end, but there I have even more faith in the community to draw a hard line. Any distro trying to cut you off from your own computer until you drink a Mountain Dew verification can is gonna get forked so hard.
This is compliance in advance of laws that will do nothing to accomplish what they claim, will provide a means for corporations to absolve themselves of wrongdoing, provides an additional means of exposing PII unintentionally, and is an outright farce of an implementation.
The danger absolutely is how its used on the front end - and we can absolutely expect the most abusive approaches possible in that regard.
This is alarming to me because we’ve seen the same type of thing getting pushed over and over and over. Despite decades of experts showing how bad of an idea this is (tech, legal, and child development experts), seeing this still being pushed demonstrates the goal. “Protecting children” is the same bit of sprinkles on top that it always has been, and complying in advance with this is a mistake.
I’m not really interested in waiting for the abusive actions we are absolutely going to see. I’m shocked, however, at the number of people who think this is perfectly fine, where I would expect more people to know better.
I think you can see why people are nervous about this sort of affordance, though. Because of the kinds of pro-surveillance politics it is actually complying with.
Is systemd going to embrace age checks?
Already merged.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954
git revert 7a858878a03966d2a65ef9e8f79b5caff352ac53
Adding a birth date field to isn’t super alarming to me. More PII is bad obviously, but it’s not required, editable by an admin, and hidden in system logs. Whatever this field will (or won’t) do, the effects are already achievable through user and group permissions.
If you read the discussion on that pull request, you’ll see there’s a ton of interest from the community in ways to privatize this, and I have a lot of faith in developers to reroute around stupidity.
The real danger comes from how it’s used in the front end, but there I have even more faith in the community to draw a hard line. Any distro trying to cut you off from your own computer until you drink a Mountain Dew verification can is gonna get forked so hard.
I very firmly disagree.
This is compliance in advance of laws that will do nothing to accomplish what they claim, will provide a means for corporations to absolve themselves of wrongdoing, provides an additional means of exposing PII unintentionally, and is an outright farce of an implementation.
The danger absolutely is how its used on the front end - and we can absolutely expect the most abusive approaches possible in that regard.
This is alarming to me because we’ve seen the same type of thing getting pushed over and over and over. Despite decades of experts showing how bad of an idea this is (tech, legal, and child development experts), seeing this still being pushed demonstrates the goal. “Protecting children” is the same bit of sprinkles on top that it always has been, and complying in advance with this is a mistake.
I’m not really interested in waiting for the abusive actions we are absolutely going to see. I’m shocked, however, at the number of people who think this is perfectly fine, where I would expect more people to know better.
It’s an optional field in the user record your distro can make use of if they want.
I think you can see why people are nervous about this sort of affordance, though. Because of the kinds of pro-surveillance politics it is actually complying with.
Spooky stuff
/s