Illinois Just Told Every Operating System to Start Reporting Your Kid's Age

There seems to be an astroturf campaign to spread hysteria online about any age-related controls. A cynic might wonder if this is being done by the social media companies themselves.

That said, TFA is misreporting what the Illinois bill does and you can read it and decide for yourself.

“Devices must provide an interface at account setup for the primary user of the device to self-report their birth date or age. Then, after receiving consent from the user, the device can share that age-range signal with online platforms or companies to provide age-appropriate safeguards and privacy protections for minors.”

https://epic.org/illinois-passes-childrens-social-media-safe...

The primary source seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment. https://www.ilga.gov/Legislation/BillStatus?GAID=18&DocNum=5...

From reading the article, it sounds like an enforced standardisation? Like, asking for account age bracket and then having a standard API to ask for it would be easy, right? Just write it to a root owned `~/.age-bracket` for each user or something (obviously something better).

It's a feature many apps implement in all kinds of ways already, especially games and social media stuff, so this, in theory, just makes it easier and consistent?

I'm against leaking our kids ages, and all the privacy and other concerns as much as anyone, but are we just getting overly angry too quickly on this one?

I get that it's a slippery slope too.

This is censorship; it is like saying you can't eat a steak because a baby can't chew it. They will try to ban Linux or fine Linux developers unless it reports the user's age.