alt Hacker NewsJust because it's easy doesn't mean it's right. Give legislative busybodies the ability to force this little flag into the OS because it's no big deal, and next year they'll say "hey, make sure you only report 18+ if secure boot is enabled" and 5 years later it'll be "hey, you can only report 18+ if one of our Identity Partners has confirmed it."
It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to compel speech (what code you write) in your open source project. It may sound stubborn but if we don't fight it now it will only grow little by "easy feature" little.
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You see a slippery slope and I see a reasonable compromise. It's a wildly popular opinion that we should control which age groups can use social media[0][1][2]. Do you think these polls are astroturfed? If not, it's clear people want some sort of age verification, and I think California's way is the least intrusive.
And I know someone is going to say 'then we should regulate social media sites to force them to verify the users' ages...' no god please no. Normalizing cloud-based age verification is far, far worse than AB 1043. If there is a principle to be set that should be: cloud should trust local, not vice versa.
[0]: https://yougov.com/articles/51000-support-for-under-16-socia...
[1]: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/widespread-support-banning-socia...
[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...
"It's the principle of the matter. The State should not be allowed to compel speech (what code you write)"
What a stretch man. Is banning nuclear weapons a restriction of free speech because it compels speech (the blueprints and specs engineers write).
And the identity partner will probably be a subsidary of palantir lol
I want to agree with you, but if it's my system and my browser reporting my bracket, wouldn't it be trivially easy to inject an http-header with the age I want to report?
And by "trivially easy" I mean "somebody already posted how-to for windows to stackoverflow"