alt Hacker News> why does the operating system need to be involved in this?
The goal in my mind is to have an account a parent can setup for their child. This account is set up by an account with more permissions access. Then the app store depends on that OS level feature to tell what apps are can be offered to the account.
Let say the the age questions happen when you install the app store. That means if you can install the app store while logged in as the child account the child can answer whatever they want and get access to apps out side of their age range. The law could require the app to be installable and configurable from a different account then given access or installed on the child account, however at a glance that seem a larger hurdle than an os/account level parental control features.
The headline calls this age verification, but the quote in the article "(2) Provide a developer who...years of age." Make it sound way different and much more reasonable than what discord is doing.
I would much rather have OSs be mandated with parental control features than what discord is currently doing. I am going to read the bill later but here is how discord age verification could work under this law.
During account creation discord access a browser level api and verifies it server side. discord no knows if the OS account is label as for someone under 13 years, over 13 and under 16, over 16 and under 18, or over 18. Then sets their discord account with the appropriate access.
No face scan, no third party, and no government ID required.
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I agree. The headline says "all operating systems, including Linux, need to have some form of age verification at account setup", which is pretty inaccurate.
It's just asking for some OS feature to report age. There's no verification during account setup. The app store or whatever will be doing verification by asking the OS. Still dumb to write this into law, but maybe not a bad way to handle the whole age verification panic we're going through.
> The goal in my mind is to have an account a parent can setup for their child. This account is set up by an account with more permissions access. Then the app store depends on that OS level feature to tell what apps are can be offered to the account.
That sounds like an OS feature that parents would like to have. Probably has some market value. Maybe just let the market figure that one out.
Or, we could have an overbroad law passed that torpedoes every open-source OS in existence. If I were MS, Google, or Apple, that'd be a great side benefit of this law. Heck, they probably already have this functionality in place.
The problem here is legally-mandated age verification, not where it is placed (although forcing it into all OSes is absolutely ...). The gains are minimal for children and the losses are gigantic for children and adults. I'm not keen to have children avoid blisters by cutting off their feet.
Put control back with the parents. Let them buy tech that restricts their children's access. This law doesn't protect children from the mountains of damaging content online.
And let all the adults run Linux if they want to without requiring Torvalds to put some kind of age question in the kernel and needing `ls` to check it every single run.