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Birthdate field under discussion also in Arch Linux (github.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62271746

Add a required birth date prompt (YYYY-MM-DD) to the user creation flow, stored as a systemd userdb JSON drop-in at /etc/userdb/.user on the target system.

Motivation

Recent age verification laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. require platforms to verify user age. Collecting birth date at install time ensures Arch Linux is compliant with these regulations.

This is just a pull request, no changes yet.

The pull-request discussion thread has been locked, just like it happened for the similar thread in Systemd, owing to the amount of negative comments...

all 6 comments

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[–] 15 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I hope they provide a non magastan version because those rules don't apply to me in my country

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The problem is, its not just the US by any stretch. And targeting volunteer devs etc is more likely to backfire. They are as much victims as the rest us. Just trying to keep these failing states from targeting them.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago

    they will anyways. first person that gets found lying or disables it, they target the distro.

    the law was written to make compliance the metric for dissidence. all "users" are minors. identities flagged as not a minor is a lie, as users cannot be minors only "account holders".

    it's not written to support the Linux ecosystem. it's specifically worded to exclude and target the Linux ecosystem if it tries to comply without using meta/google/Microsoft to handle accounts.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    They just jumped with no discussion. I hear systemd removed the merge so I thought it was settled by now. In any case, systemd is pain in the ass anyways. Those network commands are too long and I can't ever recall them. I miss Linux without having to make so many notes all the time.

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    • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Just make it default to 0-0-0000 and do zero validation, yeah it might seem weird that most of our users are thousands of years old but we're too lazy to investigate.

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    [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    I hope they make it very clear that setting this value is not recommended in most jurisdictions.

    Since this value can be used for fingerprinting, and in the future many site will be able to at least get the age range of the user. The more people set this value, the more exposed everyone is.

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