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PayPalThe US-wide operating system age verification bill we covered recently, the "Parents Decide Act", now actually has the bill published to read.
As a reminder - this bill has not yet passed, it has only been introduced and so it could change a lot before being approved, or it could get thrown out. It's early days yet but the important bit to remember is that it has bipartisan support across both the Democrats and Republicans.
The bill H. R. 8250 actually seems somewhat reasonable, especially compared to some other state-specific bills that we've seen. In this case, they only want you to enter your date of birth to confirm that you're over 18.
If you're under 18, you'll need a parent or guardian to verify a date of birth. It also requires a system for application developers to access this date of birth and to store the information securely. And, additionally, have features for parents to control what under 18s can access on a device.
What they don't say, is how a parent would verify a date of birth, it seems a quite ambiguous on that. Presumably, unless they do plan to expand on that, it would just use the honour system of a parent ticking a box and entering their date of birth to confirm.
This act would cover every single operating system. They define it pretty clearly too as "software that supports the basic functions of a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device" and providers they define as "a person that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device" - which is incredibly broad on who and what this applies directly to.
Remember though - if such a bill passes (and similar bills have already passed in certain US states), it's just a first step to be expanded upon and things can get much worse for our own control and privacy. First it's date of birth storing, next it's ID scanning and more. We all know how these things end up.
And, even if you're not in the US, these types of acts will still affect you due to how a large part of the tech industry is based in the US.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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SolipsistWerewolf 2 hours ago
This isn't even in the same league as laws similar to what Texas and the UK have passed, where they want each individual website to separately verify ages by having the user give them personally-identifiable information like IDs and selfies. This would lead to dozens of companies and "trusted partners" handling personally-identifiable information in potentially wildly differing ways. Such a situation nearly guarantees this info getting leaked on a long enough timeline. We'd much rather have this new law become the standard model than garbage like that, if these kinds of laws are inevitable anyway.
I also don't buy the slippery-slope arguments that tend to crop up in these conversations. Again, many legislatures are pushing for actual ID scanning now, in some cases successfully. They could be doing that now if they wanted to.
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