I wouldn't go so far as to call it astroturfing, but it's the same thing that's irksome about anyone claiming to speak on behalf of a group they actually have no involvement in. Feels like someone trying to score cheap points.
Of course, I'm not in favour of actual verification of the age attribute. And I've heard the slippery slope arguments. But if I were a parent this would be great.
Problem with setting up parental controls currently is that it takes some effort and knowledge of these tools, not every parent has that. I mean, even people who do, are usually chaotic in the digital domain, like for example, (re-)using very bad passwords. So why expect people to do better with parental controls?
This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.
What you actually described, however, is websites and apps reporting information about their content to the OS. That would indeed give more power to parental controls. But what's being legislated is reporting age range to platforms.
I also don't see how it takes anything away, you could still set stricter policies with those tools, or more mild ones if you set the age to 18.
For example, I can have my kid do whatever he wants in his room. I know what's in there and while he may have the occasional stupid idea, it's all fundamentally safe.
But even a tablet breaks that barrier. It's entirely safe for him to listen to music and stories and I want him to be able to do that unsupervised. But solid control over content on Spotify isn't a thing. The catalog contains things that I consider not appropriate for him. And they've lately been adding vidoes to the feed and while I know he tries hard to resist, they deliberately push videos further and further up. So we're back to "I can turn on the story for you and you can listen.", which is super stupid and could be much better if I had solid controls that I can trust.
Yes, I know I can talk to him about not watching the videos. How can an 8 year old compete with the combined effort of the Spotify team paid to make him watch videos? That's just not feasible.
But that means a user's birth date will be public viewable, for some people that would be an issue. In my opinion. bdate should not be stored anywhere in Linux or any UNIX type system. Linux and the BSD should ignore these laws completely and we move on from this.
I still do no understand why the Linux Foundation is not chiming in. By keeping quiet all the LF is doing is reinforcing the perception that LF is fully owned by "Big Tech".
If only every major distribution didn't break backwards compatibility to play with the cool kids.
Time to get back to programs that do one thing and do it well.
The Linux ecosystem would be such a vastly more enjoyable place if you people would take all that energy you put into that petty fight over systemd into something productive.
Seeing Linux drama at this point is just entertainment.
The inferior technology stack pushed by big tech and defended by people who know better has been something else.
You'll take my software freedom from my cold dead hands.
As the so-called GNU+Linux libre software it's actually being drived by IBM and propietary modules, (the official tarball has already more blobs than GPL software) Guix and Hurd are the only non-trainted environments to develop non-corporate driven environments.
From the comment closing the revert by Poettering:
>It's an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional.
And the author of the PR came in a little hot, which probably didn't help.
