You must log in or # to comment.
Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to “comply in advance” with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that’s not okay!
I studied at the PR in question and that’s not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I’d absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user’s active permission.
Basically it’s a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user’s hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.
Mind you, I feel there’s also value in loud non-compliance and I’m glad some are taking that road – keep it up, folks. But I’m leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.
That’s something I wondered about the person who implemented this too, I wonder if it was an attempt to install a bare minimum to say “There. We did it. Leave us alone.” Instead of leaving it up to the government to force the issue, and he’s getting absolutely raked over the coals for it.
If that’s the case, I feel terribly bad about this backfiring so hard on him. I do think we should be putting up a lot more resistance before resorting to something like this though.
There’s a disconnect over this in that one side looks at the present data and other takes a possible result from that into account. (dividing people into groups…for the sake of argument ok?)
Now from strictly an IT perspective, this is indeed pretty meaningless. One line of code that stores one piece of data. Who cares right?
From the other side you take the very hot topics of politics and privacy into account (two things that are also very front and center with most of the Lemmy crowd afaik).
Because it can start by just one line of code but where will it end? Personally I’d rather be over cautious and assume the worst.
I mean look at the story of cookies. Back in the 90’s they were a small benign piece of data and look how that turned out. Our entire world is influenced by it today to great extend.
Personally I’d rather be overly cautious.
Couldn’t reply to me pointing out that this was merged, and was stated to be explicitly to support age verification laws, so you had to lie about it as a meme instead.
Because thats what youre doing right now, lying and spreading misinformation. You can admit it.
The birth date field that was added can be used by age verification processes, but it’s not age verification itself.
It was added specifically for the purpose of two state laws and Brazil.
Trying to weasel it as “this doesnt implement it” is misinformation at best.
Okay.
How does it verify?sigh
How do these laws do anything to “protect children”? And since they dont actually do that, which you may already be aware of, what do you think their purpose is?
Then ask that question to yourself and think about whether the verification of an age is the issue with what’s going on here, and why people are angry with systemd maintainers merging something that houses PII, for no other stated reason or potential use case than a law that will have zero ability to “protect children”.
Edit: and to be clear, laws that currently exist in two states, CA & CO, as well as Brazil. Thats it.
Then ask that question to yourself and think about whether the verification of an age is the issue with what’s going on here
Verification is the issue. Or, rather, it would be if there was any verification here at all.
I could put 1970-01-01 in that field no problem. Systemd has asked for precisely 0 additional information from any of its users, because it neither asks you to fill it in nor verifies that what you filled it with is correct. Just like the real name and location fields that were already present, which, might I remind you, are also PII.
Systemd isn’t the problem here. The laws are a problem and pissing in systemd’s direction won’t change that.
I don’t even know where this rumour came from.
systemd is introducing birthDate as a user json field, if that’s what you mean with rumor.
The PR to revert that change was not merged:
