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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid's devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup--hardly "dystopian nightmare fuel"...
This isn't going to stop unsupervised children, which is it's own problem that technology doesn't (and probably can't) solve.
It requires every Operating System and "App Store" to know the user's age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn't get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.
The bill isn't specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.
Greedy companies do shit like that regardless of any laws. I don’t think this law makes it any more likely.
FOSS developers could create an ethical solution while still remaining legally compliant. The language is generic enough to allow for different implementations.
They try to do it all the time, but there is actually some push-back from the law - google recently lost an anti-trust case, the eu passed laws to protect "side-loading", etc. This new legislation gives them a legal backing. "Oh no, I'm sorry you can't get your app store working on Android. We aren't stopping side-loading or other app markets, we are just complying with the legal age-verification requirements".