OK, we knew this, but why have a field that the article indicates "will not be used" ? The field is there so eventually it will be populated and must be populated for these applications to query to comply with the various laws.
So this goes back to "Linux will store personal info", and my feeling this information will expand as "Age Laws" are enhanced. Distros should completely ignore these laws.
And again, why is the Linux Foundation quiet on this issue ?
And to add to this, if the field is there, we all know Firefox will look to validate it for meta and friends. That could mean in order to use Firefox, non-systemd distros will be forced to install systemd or a big piece of it.
I do not think "fascist" is there right term here. The American Heritage dictionary says "Broadly, a tendency toward or support of a strongly authoritarian or dictatorial control of government or other organizations; -- often used pejoratively in this sense". If anything, wouldn't this be anti-fascist elements?
"the facts are simply that the systemd users database has gained an optional "date of birth" field,"
The choice of what data fields to add is a political decision.
Is there an optional field for gender? For religion? For political party affiliation? For veteran status, along with the service? Clearly these are all fields where desktop environments may use or not as they deem appropriate.
"the alternative is giving families the means to manage it themselves: this is what this field enables."
That justification wrongly assumes parents primarily decide based on the age of their children, and not on other factors. Twin A can easily have different restrictions than twin B even if both are born during the same hour. Film age ratings are a recommendation which parents will override because they know their kids better than the review board.
For that matter, which parents are asking for this information, and why didn't it come up earlier? Are parents asking for systemd to store other information which would help with parental controls? Like, "nudity is okay" but "no intense violence"? What about supporting all the ESRB Content Descriptors so parents can decide which filters to have on games?
Software is politics. The decision of what to support and what not to support is politics.
"Whether desktop environments use it for parental controls, for birthday reminders"
How does "birthday reminder" even make sense? Do I need a reminder for my own birthday? Or are reminders sent to everyone on the system? And, how? I mean, a lot of people already use calendar apps, shared across multiple computers.
If the database included religion then desktop environments could have given an Eid Mubarak message to Muslims last Friday.
Some people celebrate on their saint day, so systemd should add a "patron saint" field, so the desktop environment can use it as a saint's day reminder.
> By the way, the original UNIX users database has allowed storing PII in the GECOS field since it was invented in the '70s.
The original UNIX users database was on work computers storing work-related details. Your employer already knows your PII. In addition, the fields were not required, didn't store birthday, and weren't there due to interpretation of legislative need. Plus, we stopped using it a long time ago because it wasn't useful.
(To be clear, information like "Joe Blow is in office 123B of building 4" is useful. But maintaining it in the GECOS field meant following conventions about how the data was organized, and required either someone with Unix admin rights to change it, or some mechanism where anyone could change it. Companies switched to other mechanisms to store that information, which was more appropriate to the task and separated system admin from people admin.)
