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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 a day 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.
PlayingOnLinuxphone 2 hours ago
- Facebook is pushing these laws, a surveillance capitalism big tech company.
- Most affected are Google, Apple and Microsoft, other surveillance capitalism big tech companies that benefit from it.
- We have at least 25 years of digital law surveillance history where laws are usually introduced slippery-slop.
- We already have parent control software that fulfill the job better than these laws and especially more private. Laws could force app makers to send a standardized age requirement API to make it easier for parent control software to select software based on an age. Politicians don't even think about this.
- Politicians talk about different kind of "protect kids" laws as breaking encryption, client side scanning and other surveillance methods. Since they all fail they try the slippery-slope method.
- Interesting to see it right now when all the world talks about surveillance "to protect kids". Not just governments, but also companies as Discord and the new surveillance companies as Persona (financed by Peter Thiel - anti democrat, monopolist, CEO of Palandir the surveillance software for governments including non democratic governments etc). There is a huge push from right extremist people that benefit from such systems. It was never(!) meant to protect kids!!
- It is a great base tool to implement censorship on further steps (it introduces the basics that do not exist right now).
- etc etc
And now people still come and tell "there is no slippery-slope" and "that law is totally fine". If it wouldn't be that serious and dangerous, I would have laughed at this point. I don't care for US laws since I am European and these verifications do not really affect me. Debian will not ship such verification to EU citizens and so I am kinda safe. But I still see and understand the issue coming to US (and maybe Canada) citizens and I don't want them to suffer. I love free software, because it does not care for borders and thread all people with equal respect. With these laws it will change.
And now @ people who still don't agree: Why do you prefer to send personal data to all your apps instead of improving parent control software and let apps send an age requirement to your parent control software? Why do you want to give your operating system out of your control instead of keeping control and setting it up for your kids? Why there is not any little attempt to make a real improvement for kids? Please answer these questions to yourself first before spreading another excuse for spreading invasive and anti-democratic technology.
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