alt Hacker News> Mandating OS-level age verification effectively means not allowing kids access to OSS platforms, a step way too far in my opinion. For instance, we would have to outlaw Steam Decks for kids.
This is entirely false scare tactic nonsense, and you really need to look at where you sourced that idea and no longer use them as a reference point. There isn't even a concept of a method of doing this that would make that true, and certainly not in any of the implementations being considered in the US. The federal bill is called the Parents Decide Act, if it gives you some idea where the goal in decisionmaking is supposed to be.
We have not just woefully bad parental controls, but in the name of privacy, modern platforms make it exceptionally hard to implement parental controls. What is being pushed here is largely a mandate that a system for parents to control what their kids can reach needs to exist and Internet companies need to support it.
(Steam is, FWIW, probably one of the best actors in this regard already, Steam Family is incredibly nuanced in the features and tools it gives parents. I have a lot of gripes about Steam but this is not a place they will have difficulty complying with the law. Heck, Steam is better at parental controls than Nintendo and Disney).
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The California bill, which is not called the Parents Decide Act, lets parents decide. The federal Parents Decide Act doesn't say whether parents can decide or not - it says a commission shall decide whether parents shall be able to decide, and we can predict what that commission will decide.
A Steam Deck is just an Arch Linux box. There is, intentionally by by design, no method of securing it against its user. Anyone with root access can change anything on it. There is no method of enforcing an age verification scheme on it in a way that cannot be removed or altered by a sufficiently bright and motivated teenager.
> There isn't even a concept of a method of doing this that would make that true, and certainly not in any of the implementations being considered in the US. The federal bill is called the Parents Decide Act, if it gives you some idea where the goal in decisionmaking is supposed to be.
The Parents Decide Act (PDA) goes considerably farther than superficially similar sounding laws like California's.
The California law requires that an OS allow the parent or guarding to associate an age or birthdate with the account when setting up a child's account on a device that will primarily be used for the child. It does not require any verification of the age information that the parent provides.
The PDA requires that the birthdate be provided for anyone who has an account on the device, and leaves much of the details up to the Federal Trade Commission to work out in the first 180 days after is passed. The wording of the list of things the Commission is to do suggests that the OS is supposed to actually verify age information, rather than just accept whatever a parent enters when setting up the child's device and account, and that it also has to verify that it will require the birthdate of the parent and verify that.