Technology

I mean... it's just been introduced

And according to this site it has a 1% chance of being enacted? What's that about?

Goodbye device ownership, and the last vestiges of free speech will die with this bill as well.

The last vestiges of free speech always have and always will be offline.

It's gonna take a revolution to stop that bill from happening. Seriously!

Does me tapping my order into a self-service kiosk at a restaurant count as "using" the operating system that it is running on?

Like, I feel like this is going to be really difficult to enforce, and big business might actually push back against it if they think it will hurt their bottom line, but my god can we stop with this nanny state internet surveillance bullshit already? The government is too stupid to actually protect anyone with this dumb law because there will always be loopholes and workarounds.

Sorry for this stupid question, for a non American like myself. What does this mean for you?

I'm personally against this kind of thing, but I hate how much of a fantasy echo chamber this stuff is here. There's so much misinformation and hyperbole in this thread alone.

In general I support the idea of device-level age verification. The narrative around it uses old school methods only (this one goes with just inputting your date of birth, which I've already done for years for stuff like Steam), rather than the ID or face scan by random third parties methods used in age verification discussions and requirements elsewhere. In my opinion software being able to use an API provided by the OS itself is much better, and with the right OS (linux) much more trustworthy than any web-based solution.

My only real problem is the lack of user choice. This comes in two forms:

1. Giving your birth date should be optional. I'm fine with them requiring that no birth date given means you default to being underage, but actually giving the birthdate should be up to the user.
2. The birthdate should not be given out to random software asking for it. Either the user should be asked for permission, or only a boolean of whether they are underage or not should be provided. This bill doesn't require either of those, nor leaves it to later clarification.