The Digital Age Assurance Act is a disaster both in concept and in its statutory language. Its author(s) seem to be entirely unaware of how software is distributed outside of walled gardens like Apple’s ecosystem. If I’m understanding the law correctly, then even software like Homebrew would have to implement some kind of integration with macOS to detect a user’s age. On a naive level, I’m surprised such an obviously flawed bill was passed and signed in California, where there are so many tech companies and lobbyists. The realist in me, however, realizes that tech companies don’t care about the privacy and software supply chain impacts and might even want these impacts to happen as a way of consolidating their control over the market. As an American progressive, it disappoints me that the only thing progressives and conservatives seem to agree is stripping ordinary people of any semblance of anonymity or privacy in the name of “safety”.