this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026

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I Spoke To The Developer Of The Systemd Birth Date PR - YouTube (www.youtube.com)

submitted 7 months ago by Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Its not leaving a lot of choice if it's part of systemd and I'd wager far more people do not want this than were asking for it. There's no benefit to it except for the government and corporations that want your data.

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[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (3 children)

The field doesn't do anything by itself. There is zero harm inflicted on people using systemd. There are probably lots of features of systemd that you don't want or use and the entire negative effect that you suffer is a few megabytes less free storage space.

The only way the field would be used is if a person decided to use a different piece of software that wants a birthdate. If they don't choose to install such a program then the field is no more a danger than the realName or location fields. They have scary sounding labels but do absolutely nothing unless the user chooses to use them.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

The only way the field would be used is if a person decided to use a different piece of software that wants a birthdate.

It leave the door open for this to happen. A malicious software may not advertise that it is harvesting your demographic information. Now that this is in place it's one more thing we have to worry about when evaluating software. There is absolutely no reason to be storing PII in a centralized spot where anything and everything can request it. If I want an app to have any of that shit I'll enter it on a case by case basis.

You can say "well don't put it in there" but what happens when big monopolistic corporations start requiring it to use some service of theirs that you don't have an alternative for? Now I have to maintain a separate PC for that shit? Fuck that.

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[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

You can say "well don't put it in there" but what happens when big monopolistic corporations start requiring it to use some service of theirs that you don't have an alternative for? Now I have to maintain a separate PC for that shit? Fuck that.

If you choose to use a service that requires age verification then that service will store your age verification information on your computer somewhere. If it is stored in systemd, malicious programs will be able to access it. If it is not stored in systemd, malicious programs will still be able to access it.

If you choose to not use a service that requires age verification, then you will not store any age verification information on your computer to be stolen by malicious software. Even if systemd has a birthDate field you will not store any age verification information.

The difference in these two scenarios is your choice to use age verification or not. The location where the data is stored doesn't change the scenario.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 point 7 months ago

The difference is using a centralized point on the OS that is designed to hand that info out to anyone that requests it, vs each app prompting the user and storing that info in a profile that is hopefully encrypted if they are doing things right and NOT designed to hand it out to anything else.

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