It’s a technofix for a problem that should be adressed way earlier in the pipeline, as is basically all carbon capture in general. These efforts divert energy and attention from solutions that actually matter.
Maybe, but it is better to try to fix a problem that exist than doing nothing hoping to fix the cause.
What would you suggest as “solutions that actually matter” ?
It is not wild in their eyes, they need to find a way to justify it after all.
But I think that this way they are opening the door to the possibility to be sued or to be considered responsable for what is on the play store. It is not a stretch to go from “I need to verify your identity” to “you are responsible for what you accept to put on the store”. They want control, they will get even responsability.
If the birthdate field is just a random number, then I don’t see why anyone cares - it would have less personally identifying information than the MAC address.
True.
I thought the whole reason people are up in arms about this is the proposal/hypothetical where the OS is required to validate that field against government ID databases, thus giving a third party - the OS vendor or whatever contractor performs the validation - a link to real world identity of any computer user.
I agree, but in the end it is nothing new in a professional environment.
For example in Italy (but I suppose in EU as well), my employer already know my birth date since I am required by law to undergo a medical examination at regular intervals (with the interval depending on the work and age), so this information is already stored in some way and it need to be correct, my company get fined if I am not checked when required. Having it in systemd or in active directory or any other user management system make no difference.
The problem would arise if there will not be any option to avoid the check, but again, in some countries you cannot ask anything you don’t need to offer the service, and I am pretty sure that the birth date is not necessary to setup an user account on my personal home pc.
The point there is that complying with the whims of every town on the planet gets to be unmanageable. A town with <1000 people deciding what fields are present for the other 8 billion is insane.
Nah, if the problem is the whim of small town I don’t think someone would go to the trouble to implement it. The problem is if the law is from a country, and even in this case it would not be obvious that someone would do something.
Then there we could start a discussion about how this was handled in Systemd, but it out of scope.
I picked color as an example for something dumb that wouldn’t matter. I hoped that was obvious.
I know it was just an example.
And if you can just lie about it, then why even bother including the field at all?
Because who write the law do not understand anything about it and they are naive enough to think that everyone will answer sincerely.
Exactly. How does systemd decide which set of laws to follow? The ones that say you need to report the data or the ones that say you can’t?
That should be asked to the guy who implemented the feature and to the maintainer of Systemd. But the real problem here is that they think that what US laws say are valid everywere in the world. (Not that I have any confidence that Pottering and the other guy would answer in some intelligent way…)
So, I can see where commercial OSes, like Windows and MacOS, but maybe including Chrome, Red Hat, and similar, would welcome the requirement to collect user ages. Another piece of user data for telemetry, ad serving, etc, with the cover of ‘government made me do it.’
Except that maybe they are smart enough to understand that there is no way to be sure that the date is accurate and so you have an high possibility to profile the user in the wrong category.
What if Hemmingford, NE passes the same law but wants your favorite color instead of dob?
You simply input a random color. How they can check if it is true ? Same for any other field.
What if India says the OS needs to verify your caste, or any number of oppressive countries want your religion as a field? Hell, the US is like one step away from saying your gender assigned at birth needs to be tracked.
In some countries it would be illegal to ask for such data. (EU for example)
Then I totally agree that this law is beyond stupid.
As long as also the liberals follow the same law practing what they preach, it would be interesting to see who will survive in the end.