this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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It isn’t mandating you affirm you’re older than 18. It’s asking explicitly for your age or your birthday.
While the API then would take that data to transmit your age bracket to other systems.
This might not be drastically burdensome on an individual workstation, I’ll stand corrected on that. And it’s not disclosing your actual birthdate to anyone either (though I still feel like it should be my choice whether or not to store that information on my personal device).
In either case, we started with this “affirm your age” kind of law on various kinds of restricted websites (pornography and alcohol) and it’s easy to just lie. So now that is now morphing into more invasive age verification strategies.
I view this law as easily circumvented theater that has the aside effect of being a slippery slope toward more aggressive anti-privacy systems in the future.