Store birth date in systemd for age verification

miohtama

This should be the time for open-source developers to use their common sense to decide whether we should push back. If California wants to create its own Protect the children operating system, it should bear the cost and responsibility for this alone, and not export any of the sketchy political agenda to the wider open source community.

JellyYelly

I don't mean to come across as a snob, or anything like that, but I find this PR really odd. It's the authors first time contributing to this repo and it the feedback on the PR that was addressed is really odd, like some of it is super basic stuff, even if you're not familiar with the code base or the language. Just an all round weird vibe.

icar

Having this in userdb is not bad per se. We already have a bunch of PII in there.

anotherhadi

Pretty good implementation imo

noobermin

The context is that this is in response to California in the US potentially passing a law that requires age verification on the operating system level.

bravetraveler

Where can I drop a file to always return 1969

mzajc

Tangentially related, but does anyone know what Poettering's "cryptographically verifiable integrity" endeavor[0] is about yet? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

petee

I had to check the date; is not April yet

jprjr_

I cannot express how disappointed I am to see open source projects giving in to complying with age attestation laws. I feel like complying really undermines any first amendment arguments. Software is a first amendment protected form of expression, giving in before getting any actual threats from the state makes your participation seem voluntary. Systemd's participation puts the entire world into compliance with a California law

bmlzootown

This is absolutely ridiculous.

zoobab

Instead of protesting, large corporations decided to ploy. They cannot loose markets, like California or Brazil.

jmclnx

Interesting solution and I really expected systemd would be were this age validation would be placed if distros what it. But if this becomes a thing in Linux for the distro I use (doubtful), I will abandon Linux after 30+ years. I am rather confident OpenBSD will ignore this law and I expect other BSDs will to. If not, back to DOS :) Note, I have a BSD on a coupld of old laptops for testing reasons. I test what I write in the BSDs to help find issues, that works well.

bibimsz

i dont like this

nazgulsenpai

Will unincorporated distros who don't comply be illegal to use in the areas passing these laws? This isn't "obscenity" -- isn't there a first amendment argument for these projects?

dirtikiti

"protecting" children by providing specific ages to data harvesters. as per usual, liberal policy doing the exact opposite thing they claim it does.

flykespice

It's scary how much global surveillance is closing in to become a reality with states passing these lesgilations, in the name of "protecting children", but it just serves to collect citizent personal data... And now they are creeping into open source projects too. What once was thought as the bastion of absolute freedom from the state

calvinmorrison

This should fit lennarts hubris well. This developer should be blacklisted from all open source projects, permanently.

acuozzo

How would this work for multiuser accounts? Mu kids all share the same account on the family computer.

exabrial

Thank you blue states for the stupidity.

ameixaseca

From the pull request: > 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 Brazilian law does NOT require this. This is a misconception, and likely based on an understanding of California's law being extrapolated to the Brazilian law. They are almost complete opposites. The Brazilian law (Lei 15.211/2025) puts the burden of age verification on *providers* of web platforms, app stores, or dumb terminals. Not on operational systems. It also mentions "reasonable measurements" - which vary according to the type of content, platform, etc - and which are much less strict that anything written in California's or UK's laws regarding the same subject. It is far more based on individual risk assessment and purpose of the platforms themselves. In all fairness, the Brazilian law is the most friendly to open source and the status quo. Even though I'm also worried about the long term results of this legislation, I'm somewhat relieved by the way it turned out.