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hellojesus: Are these laws not 1A violations due to code being speech and the gov not being allowed to compel speech?

akersten: Aaaaand to throw it all away at the end with "well when the rubber meets the road we'll comply anyway, thanks for inhaling my hot air." Take a damn stand and dare them to sue the hacker known as Linux or whatever.

sahilkerkar: I'd say that anger is better directed towards the legislators in charge of creating these absurd policies, not the folks at System76. It's not reasonable to expect a company to sacrifice its entire business on a moral battlefield.

piraccini: I love Pop!_OS (and Cosmic) but if they start with this bullshit I need to switch to other Linux distributions. Worst case, will build my own...

Tyrubias: I don’t like to shill for companies, but I’m glad System76 made a statement. The addendum does feel like their legal team made them add it though:> Some of these laws impose requirements on System76 and Linux distributions in general. The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers. Should this method of age attestation become the standard, apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users.> We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws. Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad. No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing device. Otherwise, given the pervasive tracking done by corporations and the rise of constant surveillance outdoors, there will be nowhere for people to safely gather and express themselves freely and privately.

arjie: tl;dr they don't like them and don't want them in place but will comply

jrm4: I mean, genuine question, is Linux Mint or MX Linux endangered by this?Because if not, hey, not much of value will be lost.

bitwize: If you don't like it, write your Congressman.

jrm4: Right, but in turn it is absolutely reasonable and good for consumers to threaten a company with (legal) harm or extinction on a moral battlefield.

dragonwriter: To the extent code is functional rather than expressive it is not speech, and when the government seeks to compel code, it generally seeks to compel function not expressive content.(That doesn’t mean it is not a bad idea, and even perhaps unconstitutional for other reasons.)

arcfour: Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.I don't think a cryptographic algorithm is "expressive" any more than it is purely functional and yet it was still ruled to be speech. Regardless - code is speech, and the government cannot compel or prevent speech except in very narrow circumstances.

cyberax: The age verification laws are awesome!I mean... How else would you educate children about computers and evading stupid restrictions?

LoganDark: Code may be speech, but the functional characteristics of systems that happen to rely on code may not always also be speech.

al_borland: > Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late.I saw this a lot in college. Kids that didn’t have any freedom or autonomy while living at home went wild in college. They had no idea how to self-regulate. A lot of them failed out. Those who didn’t had some rough years. Sheltering kids for too long seems to do more harm than good. At least if they run into issues while still children, their parents can be there to help them through it so they can better navigate on their own once they move out.

johncolanduoni: Very narrow circumstances like the DMCA? I don’t think the jurisprudence is as simple as you’re making it out to be.

rockskon: *attestation, not verification

panja: Gotta find a way to profitability I suppose

trinsic2: I have been saying this all along. You can prevent kids from getting around restrictions. All you can do is try to help them understand what they find on the other side and what some options are. Age-gating is just a way to push forward a surveillance agenda. The fact thats happening everywhere all at once proves my point.

dragonwriter: > Code is speech, though, and is protected by the first amendment: see Bernstein v. United States.That is very much overstating the holding in the case [0], the most relevant part of which seems to be:“encryption software, in its source code form and as employed by those in the field of cryptography, must be viewed as expressive for First Amendment purposes”The ruling spends a key bit of analysis discussing the expressive function of source code in this field as distinct from the function of object code in controlling a computer.A law compelling providing functionality which it is merely most convenient to comply with by creating source code as part of the process is not directing speech, any more than an law delivery of physical goods where the most convenient method of doing so involves interacting by speech with the person who physically holds them on your behalf is.[0] text here: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/176/176.F3d...

pgn674: I think this is the way that Linux desktop distributions are endangered, quoting from the article: "... apps and websites will not assume liability when a signal is not provided and assume the lowest age bracket. Any Linux distribution that does not provide an age bracket signal will result in a nerfed internet for their users."

charcircuit: I don't think the argument that children might bypass parental controls therefore devices should not have parental controls.>Limiting a child’s ability to explore what they can do with a computer limits their future.Parents don't want to limit their children from writing software. Saying that limiting minors from accessing porn will limit their future is another argument I doing think many will agree with.

hulitu: > The California law, and Colorado law modeled after it, were agreed in concert with major operating system providers.So it is Microsoft, Google and Apple pushing for this.

threatofrain: > Anyways, it feels like all sides of the political spectrum are trying to strip away any semblance of anonymity or privacy online both in the US and abroad.It's not this or that political party, your neighbors simply don't share your values. Maybe you don't agree with their values either — like to what degree we should be ceding privacy in favor of fighting child exploitation on the internet. Child protection arguments work because it is a compass to the true feelings of your neighbors.

choonway: this is how and adult sounds like in a room full of children.

heavyset_go: Just a reminder of what liability the CA age verification law imposes upon developers and providers.It's not enough to adhere to the OS age signal:> (3) (A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a user’s age range for purposes of determining the user’s age.> (B) If a developer has internal clear and convincing information that a user’s age is different than the age indicated by a signal received pursuant to this title, the developer shall use that information as the primary indicator of the user’s age.Developers are still burdened with additional liability if they have reason to believe users are underage, even if their age flag says otherwise.The only way to mitigate this liability is to confirm your users are of age with facial and ID scans, as it is implemented across platforms already. Not doing so opens you up to liability if someone ever writes "im 12 lol" on your app/platform.

panny: >A law compelling providing functionalityThat's forced labor. I'm not required to write a line of code to please anyone. It's free software with no warranty. They have LLMs, let's see them build it. :)

dylan604: >You can prevent kids from getting around restrictionsI'm guessing you meant can't

trinsic2: Yes. Fixed

teekert: Makes sense, these laws are great for the establishment. Difficult to adhere to for newcomers or smaller parties. Compliance to this madness eats away a much larger proportion of thin profits.

bradley13: These lawd prove one thing: the politicians know nothing about the subject matter.What is almost more disturbing: at least some of the politicians will have been advised by consultants or lobbyists who know what they're advocating for. What's their game?

k310: I have to wonderA. If end users will mod their distros to send a "signal" (TBD?) to websites.B. If end users will just grab a pirate OS with apps compiled to not care about age.Hopefully the latest TAILS I downloaded is free of Big (over 18) Brother. And (A)Or just compile, Gentoo and LFS style.C. If pirates just take care of all this for friends and neighbors.D. When, not if, this unconstitutional coercion is challenged in court and cancelled via petition. Remember Proposition 8?

armadyl: I could see them eventually going far enough to bypass all of that and either requiring age verification at the point of the internet uplink on the ISP side or making it a crime similar to using a fake ID to buy alcohol if you try to bypass it. And then also punish companies that happen to be serving underage/non verified users.

dragonwriter: > > A law compelling providing functionality> That's forced labor.Well, that's a 13th Amendment issue not a 1st Amendment one, but, in any case, its not forced if it doesn't direct who does the work to create the functionality, only requires you to have the functionality provided if you are doing some other activity, it is more of an in-kind tax. [0] (Now, if you want to make an argument that when the activity it is conditioned on is expressive that that makes it a 1A violation as a content-based regulation when the condition is tied to the content of the expressive act, that is a better 1A argument, that might actually have some merit against many of the real uses of, say, age verification laws; but “if I am doing this activity, I must either create or acquire and use software that has a specified function” is not, in general, a 1A violation.)[0] It's not really that other than metaphorically, either, any more than every regulation of any kind is an “in-kind tax”, but its far closer to that than “forced labor”.

wtallis: > if they have reason to believe users are underageThe law requires "clear and convincing information", not merely "reason to believe". And since the law requires developers to rely on the provide age signal as the primary indicator of the user's age, developers are not incentivized to create a system that uses sophisticated data mining to derive an estimated age. If someone posts a comment on a YouTube video saying "I'm twelve years old and what is this?", that would absolutely not require YouTube to immediately start treating that account as an under-13 account.

arcfour: > In the government's view, by targeting this unique functional aspect of source code, rather than the content of the ideas that may be expressed therein, the export regulations manage to skirt entirely the concerns of the First Amendment. This argument is flawed for at least two reasons...I think you should read it a bit more closely. The court threw out the "functional/expressive" argument for source code, like I said in my original comment.Secondly, what are you talking about that source code is the most "convenient" way to implement this? It's the literal, only possible way to present an interface to a user, ask them a question, and "signal" to other applications if the user is a minor or not. You're being completely nonsensical there. There's no other way to do that: someone must write some code. The bill specifically says "an API"!

bradley13: Let's be clear: this is a first step. The obvious next step is to require proof of age.This ties in nicely with the international movement to require ID to use social media.Why is this an international movement? Suddenly, simultaneously, all over the Western world? It's enough to make on believe in conspiracies...

DoctorMckay101: I was gifted my first computer, running Windows 95, at 11 years of age. By age 13 I was probably within the five people who better understood how to do stuff on a computer in my town. By age 16 I was making Pokemon hackroms, flash animations for newgrounds and translating manga for pirate sites in photoshop. By then I knew my entire life would be tied to computers somehow.Now some 50-60yo politician who has never even created a folder in their desktop without help wants to dictate how I should have used my device?Fuck'em

ls612: It is as Aristotle said, the average person is a natural born slave (to their emotions, and thus to the rhetoriticians most skilled in changing them). That is why democracy always fails in the end. Americans just had such good geographic and historic luck to delay this reckoning by a century or two.If you see politics through this lens then the 'democratic backsliding' that has been universal across the world for the past two decades is entirely unsurprising.Vae Victus.

stephbook: How do you know all this before any court decided upon it?

panny: >its not forced if it doesn't direct who does the workGood, because I'm not writing it, f\/ck them. Free software, no warranty. Use it if you want to. Otherwise, pound sand.

verdverm: Good words, glad to see more companies taking a principled stance on these important matters. That leading quote is great for sharing with non-technical friends. We have 365d 23h of non-voting time to take direct action to make our world better.

arcfour: I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but if you are suggesting that writing an "API", as is legally required in AB1043, can be done without writing code I would be interested to know how!

dragonwriter: Writing an API is not required by AB1043.Providing an API is required if you do some other thing, but you are not required to do that other thing. Requirements that are triggered by engaging in some other activity are not compulsions if the activity they are triggered by is not compulsory. (Now, whether restricting the thing that triggers the requirement by adding the requirement is permissible is a legitimate question, but that is not the question that is addressed when you ignore the thing triggering the requirement and treat the requirement as a free-standing mandate.)

shevy-java: > Accessibility features for ADAThe problem is that the comparison falls flat. ADA does not sniff for birth date and surrender that data to others. One has to look at things at a cohesive unit, e. g. insecure bootloaders by Microsoft surrendering data to others. It seems as if they try to make computers spy-devices. That in itself is suspicious. Why should we support any such move? Some laws are clearly written by lobbyists.

heavyset_go: That would have to be litigated in court, and the easiest and cheapest way to avoid litigation is to just scan faces and IDs so you're sure your users won't upload or say anything that can bankrupt you while you sleep.

wtallis: It would be at least as valid a strategy to avoid collecting any unnecessary personal information about your users, so that you don't have to worry about whether the information you've amassed adds up to "internal clear and convincing information".Remember, only the state AG can bring a suit under this law, and the penalty is limited to $2500 per child for negligent violations. It's probably cheaper to get insurance against such a judgement than to implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system.

hananova: I can't fathom all the rage and confusion here about these laws. It's been a well-known effect since forever that when a government deems that something needs to be done, they'll go for the first "something-shaped" solution.This all could've been avoided. Governments all over the world have been ringing the alarm bells about lack of self-regulation in tech and social media. And instead of doing even a minimum of regulation, anything to calm or assuage the governments, the entire industry went balls-to-the-wall "line go up" mode. We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.If you look back, it didn't have to be this way: - Governments told game publishers to find a system to handle age rating or else. The industry developed the ESRB (and other local systems), and no "or else" happened. - Governments told phone and smart device manufacturers to collectively standardize on a charging standard, almost everyone agreed on USB-C and only many years later did the government step in and force the lone outlier to play ball. If that one hadn't been stubborn, there wouldn't have been a law.The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not to, and now something impractical (but you better find a way anyway, or else) will be forced upon them. And I won't shed a tear for the poor companies finally having to do something.

shevy-java: > We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.Why would we have to be blamed for a law written by some lobbyists? That makes no sense at all. There are of course some folks that are in favour of this because "of the children" but their rationale does not apply to me nor to many other people. Why should they be able to force people to surrender their data, with the operating system becoming a sniffer giving out private data to everyone else? That makes no sense.

FuckButtons: Counterpoint, my parents didn’t shelter me from shit and my life went off the rails at 12.

shevy-java: So this has recently also affected Ubuntu.One developer began a discussion:https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/04...Their attempts of a "solution" are quite interesting. One other user suggested that GUI tools ask for the age of the user.Well ... I have a very strong opinion here. I have been using Linux since over 20 years and I will not ever give any information about my personal data to the computer devices I own and control. So any GUI asking for this specifically would betray me - and I will remove it. (Granted, it is easier to patch out the offending betrayal code and recompile the thing; I do this with KDE where Nate added the pester-donation daemon. Don't complain about this on reddit #kde, he will ban you. KDE needs more money! That's the new KDE. I prefer oldschool KDE but I digress so back to the topic of age "verification").The whole discussion about age "verification" appears to be to force everyone into giving data to the government. I don't buy for a moment that this is about "protecting children". And, even IF it were, I could not care any less about the government's strategy. Even more so as I am not in the country that decided this in the first place, so why would I be forced to comply with it when it ends up with GUI tools wanting to sniff my information and then give it to others? For similar reasons, one reason I use ublock origin is to give as few information to outside entities when I browse the web (I am not 100% consistent here, because I mostly use ublock origin to re-define the user interface, which includes blocking annoying popups and what not; that is the primary use case, but to lessen the information my browser gives to anyone else, is also a good thing. I fail to see why I would want to surrender my private data, unless there is really no alternative, e. g. online financial transactions.)I also don't think we should call this age "verification" law. This is very clearly written by a lobbiyst or several lobbyists who want to sniff more data off of people. The very underlying idea here is wrong - I would not accept Linux to become a spy-tool for the government. I am not interested in how a government tries to reason about this betrayal - none of those attempts of "explanation" apply in my case. It is simply not the job of the government to sniff after all people at all times. This would normally require a warrant/reasonable suspicion of a crime. Why would people surrender their rights here? Why is a government sniffing after people suddenly? These are important questions. That law suddenly emerging but not in the last +25 years is super-suspicious.

dragonwriter: I think you should read a bit more closely, both to the decision, and to the post you are responding to (which addresses that), and to the context of what is being discussed in the thread (which is not "source code").

stephbook: What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anyway

heavyset_go: Do you want to go to court to find out where the line is? That's expensive, risky and time consuming. It's easier to just scan faces and IDs to make sure your users are of age and not take on that liability.

idle_zealot: > No one should have to provide any personal details to use any general computing deviceI agree. I also agree with S76 that some laws regarding how an operating system intended for wide use should function are acceptable. How would you react to this law if the requirement was only that the operating system had to ask the user what age bracket it should report to sites? You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?I ask because I feel like if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their users, and I really don't want to live in that world.

heavyset_go: > if we don't do something, the trajectory is that ~every website and app is going to either voluntarily or compulsorily do face scans, AI behavior analysis, and ID checks for their usersYou're going to get that, anyway. Platforms want to sell their userbases as real monetizable humans. Governments want to know who says and reads what online. AI companies want your face to train their systems they sell to the government, and they want to the be the gatekeepers that rank internet content for age appropriateness and use that content as free training material.Age verification across platforms is already implemented as AI face and ID scans. This is where we're already at.

saltysalt: It's sad to see such big brother crap in Linux, which sees like the exact opposite of the hacker ethos it was originally built upon.

bruceb: You can. Most children are not going to end up on HN when they are older. The stories you read here about hacking system at 11 are outliers.

leni536: And the outliers brag about them, then help out their classmates.

vaylian: > The industry had a chance to do something practical, the industry chose not toWrong. There was no choice. Any type of identification technology causes more problems than it solves. The right choice is to look for different approaches than identification technology for solving the problems. And as the article points out, the problems are best tackled with education and not with tech.

kevincloudsec: requiring the OS to broadcast an age bracket to every app and website is building a new tracking vector and calling it child safety lol

panny: >We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.No, "we" really don't. I wrote software. It's free. You're welcome to use it, or not. Nobody is forcing my software on you. You are not allowed to tell me that the software I wrote, for free, and gave to you, for free, needs to have features that I don't care about.You have an LLM now. I'm obsolete now, right? Do it. Build your nerfed distro, and make it popular. Oh, yeah... there isn't a single solitary disto built by an LLM, is there? Not even one. Wow. I wonder why...

winrid: Your ISP will require it.

Dylan16807: > GoodDon't you mean "bad"? Shouldn't you want it to be a violation of the constitution so it gets thrown out?

budududuroiu: > What you're saying is we should allow kids to buy tobacco, to gamble, to purchase Meth and Heroine because Kids get around restrictions anywayThis is false equivalence. All of the above are vices that objectively carry more harm than good. There's no inherent harm in using a computer, there's a subset of ways in which using a computer can be harmful, which kids can be taught how to avoid or navigate, there's no subset of meth use that isn't harmful

winrid: None of these people actually care about children.

kij: Vae victo — Vae victis

arcfour: > Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user...

lawn: There's a balance to be struck, it shouldn't be all or nothing.

arcfour: I look forward to your blog post on how to implement "an API" without writing source code. It should be informative!

Dylan16807: That's not a counterpoint. The inverse of "shelter too long" is "shelter less long", not "zero shelter ever".(And the proper way to do "less long" is to slowly loosen up over time.)

ball_of_lint: There needs to be both things - the opportunity to make mistakes, and the support to make it okay after mistakes are made.Sounds like you got the first but not the second, which must have been tough. Hope you're doing better now.

globemaster99: So much for freedom and democracy lectured by Americans and westerners to the rest of the world. This is just censorship of every form of freedom of speech. This got nothing to do with children or youth. They will eventually censor and track everyone.

sp1rit: I wonder who is behind this sudden push for these age verification laws. This wasn't an issue until recently and suddenly there are not just laws in California and Colorado, but also New York and Brazil.

heavyset_go: No platform is going to forgo analytics and and using demographic information for advertising, that's their bread and butter.I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.> implement an invasive ID-scanning age verification system (and assume the risks of handling such highly-sensitive personal information)It's already implemented as face and ID scans by all the major platforms as it is. The systems area already there and they're already deployed.Apps and platforms already integrate with 3rd party age verification platforms who handle the face and ID data, nothing ever has to touch your servers.

kortilla: Speak for yourself. This is impacting open source and is fundamentally against the open source ethos.Governments demanding computers enforce age is as dumb as governments demanding books, pen, and paper enforce age.This is unrelated to industry. This is idiots running the government.

dpe82: I'm probably missing something, but when I read the California statute I didn't understand it to be anything like "computers enforcing age" - more like, when you create an account it needs to ask your age, and then provide a system API by which apps can ask what bracket the account holder is in. This seems better than the current solution of every app asking independently?Again, I'm probably missing something but it strikes me as pretty trivial to comply with?

AnthonyMouse: The main problem with the "report your age to the website" proposals is that they're backwards. You shouldn't be leaking your age to the service.Instead, the service should be telling your device the nature of the content. Then, if the content is for adults and you're not one, your parents can configure your device not to display it.

thayne: > How would you react to this law if the requirement was only that the operating system had to ask the user what age bracket it should report to sites? You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?Isn't that what the CA law is?

Dylan16807: > I'd also argue it's clear and convincing if a kid changes their profile picture to a selfie of themselves, says they're 12, says they're in grade school, etc. Any reasonable person would take that at face value.That's so fragile, and it's not like they're making those claims to the site, it's natural language posting.And someone who knows what they're doing would never take "I'm twelve years old and what is this?" at face value.

AnthonyMouse: > your neighbors simply don't share your valuesThe problem with this argument is that everyone agrees with protecting children."Think of the children" arguments are the legislator's fallacy: Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.In reality there are alternative means to accomplish any given goal, and the debate is about what should be done, because no one benefits from using methods that cost more than they're worth.Well, almost no one. The opportunists who drape themselves in the cloak of "safety" when they want to have the government mandate the use of their services or use it as an excuse to monopolize markets or establish a chokepoint for surveillance and censorship do benefit from the machinations that allow them to screw the majority of the population. But the majority of the population doesn't.

Jean-Papoulos: > We, collectively, only have ourselves to blame, and now it's too late.Can't believe I'm reading this. I don't want age verification at all, whether it's self-imposed or not. I should be free to use whatever tools I want however I want.

akersten: We should collectively make sure that any PRs trying to land these changes are very well reviewed. We wouldn't want any security holes to slip by. I think a couple dozen rounds of reviews should suffice. I've heard great things about how productive AI can be at generating very thorough code quality assessments. After all, we should only ship it once it's perfect.To be more direct - if you're in any editorial position where something that smells like this might require your approval, please give it the scrutiny it deserves. That is, the same scrutiny that a malicious actor submitting a PR that introduces a PII-leaking security hole would receive. As an industry we need to civil disobedience the fuck out of this.

heavyset_go: Would you be willing to send explicit content to someone who presents themselves as a child online? A reasonable person wouldn't.No one is suggesting a meme should be taken literally.

jusssi: Potential confusion of cause and effect: maybe some weren't given any freedom because they were repeatedly unable to self-regulate.

akersten: There is already age verification at the ISP level. They only sell Internet service to adults. What the adults choose to do with it or with whom they share it with should be of zero concern to the government.Of course, that's an ineffective argument, because the long-term goal of these laws (in the sense of, "the goal of the system is what it does") was never going to be about keeping kids off the Internet.

brabel: If that’s true, I think the law is fine. There are good solutions for anonymous disclosure of information about you, the most mature being Verifiable Credentials, which is an open standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentialsYou can disclose just a subset of a credential, and that can be a derived value (eg age bracket instead of date of birth), and a derived key is used so that its cryptographically impossible to track you. I wish more people discussed using that, but I suspect that it’s a bit too secure for their real intentions.

crote: I read it the exact opposite way: you are forbidden from using facial and ID scans solely for age verification (as the OS-provided signal shall be the primary indicator of age), but if you already need to obtain the user's age for other reasons using more reliable means (say, a banking KYC law requiring ID scans) you are not required to discard this more reliable source in favor of the OS-provided signal.

db48x: Almost. Technically an adult must create an account for any non–adult who wants to use the computer, and configure it with the appropriate age category.Honestly it’s the dumbest thing ever. Best just not to play that game.

drnick1: California may be able to target companies like System76, but it will be completely powerless against modular and decentralized distros like Debian and Arch.

AnthonyMouse: In general, any proposal to use government ID for "age verification" over the internet is going to end in someone using it for mass surveillance, and it's probably not wrong to suspect that as the intention to begin with.There is no benefit in doing that because parents already know how old their kid is. They don't need the government to certify it to them, and then they can configure the kid's device not to display adult content.Involving government ID is pointless because the parent, along with the large majority of the general population, has an adult ID, and therefore has the ability to configure the kid's device to display adult content or not even in the presence of an ID requirement if that's what they want to do. At which point an ID requirement is nothing but a footgun to "accidentally" compromise everyone's privacy. Unless that was the point.

marssaxman: "because we didn't do a stupid and pointless thing, now we are being forced to do a stupid and pointless thing, therefore we are to blame"Uh, no.

cassonmars: It's simple. Don't comply. Software engineers, despite not having the same requirement of mechanical engineers, should uphold the ethical obligations of their craft. This law is harmful. Given the requirement of compelled speech, given code has been _proven_ to be such, Do. Not. Comply.

crote: ... except that analyzing profile pictures isn't exactly reliable (plenty of people use photos of their cats), people lie in chat, and advertising profiles are at best an educated guess.The current analytics profiles are closer to "definitely into Roblox, 70% chance of being 13-18" than "This user was beyond any reasonable doubt born on 07-03-2002". Calling them "clear and convincing information" would be a massive exaggeration.