93
I Spoke To The Developer Of The Systemd Birth Date PR - YouTube (www.youtube.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
202 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent