> The signal itself isn’t a birthday, it’s a bracket: under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 and up. Operating systems have until January 1, 2028 to have this built.

> Nothing in the bill requires a passport scan or a face scan at setup. It’s self-declared, the same way most apps ask your birthday today, just centralized once at the OS level instead of repeated app by app.

Maybe this is just a badly written law or purposefully designed to have basically no impact on anyone?

Or maybe the age bracket self-declaration part of this might make it a legitimately useful mechanism when a parent sets up a device for their kids. Their device declares “under 13” and apps and sites have to then follow the more strict social media laws which themselves should be relatively beneficial to the target audience.

In other words, the part that’s really privacy-destroying is the age verification, but that’s not part of this bill. The part that could be a benefit is the part where companies need to respect an age flag set by parents and comply with a concrete set of parental controls.

In other other words, it’s not left up to operators like Meta and Roblox to decide what age their users are, parents can set that device-wide and know it can’t be circumvented.