> In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law. That closes off potential abuse of the age API that could have led to it being used as a general-purpose data collection channel even when age verification wasn’t required.

Honestly hate all this. This is just a "geeks shut up" law. Excluding things that are not part of commerce (FOSS) probably even gives it some protection from constitutional challenges.

And the quoted part above indicates that it is purely a government ID system - run the thought experiment where you were a conscientious person in 2005 deciding to start a social network, and this law had been passed in 2004. You wouldn't be allowed to use it to exclude children. And where will it be "required by law"? Since the pretense was to target social media and porn was just a bit of moral backwash, it will be required by law on arbitrary sites that allow any users to post.

Geeks will shut up because they love how specific it is. And even as GrapheneOS is being banned already from being able to use websites and services, they'll be shocked when their unattested FOSS machines aren't allowed on the network at all.

It passed unanimously because it means absolutely nothing, and politicians were getting shit from their rich loudmouth programmer constituents who will go back to spending time on their YIMBY activism.