most people can get behind parental control. that is why bad actors are pushing for age verification everywhere nowadays.

i think the issue many people have with that field is, that it enables bad actors to do things. all the while, it does not really do the thing it is supposed to do: if i trust my kid with sudo, the field can easily be altered. if i do not trust my kid with sudo, it cannot install anything either way.

with your last paragraph i (and probably most people) agree. but we already have those tools, right? at least until i knew computers better than my parents, there was no way i could install anything without them being OK with it. even when i was admin on my very own desktop, i was heavily reliant on the parents for everything costing money. yes, even my dumb ass figured out how to pirate stuff. but to do that while being afraid to brick your precious device with some virus - you need some tech literacy, which is for sure beyond changing one value.

Why do people so often invert the burden of proof?

I know, right ?

If someone says “Picking your nose will cause brain-cancer in 40 years.” Then they have the burden to proof that. Nobody has the burden to disprove that.

Absolutely, and if you'd asked for proof of their accusation you'd be correct in this instance.

They made the accusation that this is a step to make this age fields mandatory, and controlled by third-party age verification services, so they have the burden to proof that there is way to do that.

They did and you could ask them to make a case for that, you didn't.

You provided your own accusation:

You do know that this is a slippery slope argument, right?

And proceeded to tell them that they are required to provide proof to dispute your new accusation.

You would have to demonstrate that there is an intention there to require third party services to validate the age of users using Linux… Or that there is an intention to do so by systemd and the broader open source developers.

Which is what i was addressing specifically when i said:

You , as the party making the accusation of fallacy would be required to prove that the expectation of escalation is unreasonable or that the intention was not there.

I find it highly unlikely, because most people using Linux systems at home have admin privileges. Which makes this whole point moot, since they can fake whatever they like to the software running on top.

It makes the field itself mostly a non issue in the single isolated context of "does this field, on it's own, constitute age verification".

The point most people are trying to make is that it's a part of a larger context.

Sounds like we are violently in agreement then, that all of those fields should be removed.

Good outcome.

because it’s too late at that point, which is the whole point and issue!

if the field is necessary, but the data is useless, then it shouldn’t be there. if the data becomes required then it should not be there. so the result, it should not be there