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Colorado and California age verification bills exempt open source operating systems (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/foss@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The social media companies don't want that kind of responsibility. So they're trying to make the operating system vendors do it. That's roughly how that law came into existence.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    More or less. When I spoke with Wicks’ staffers in charge of this, they said that the reason behind it is that California has age restrictions for various kinds of sites and applications (no porn apps under 18, restrictions on social media and chat for kids, etc). The various big tech companies said they didn’t want to be responsible for figuring out how to track and verify all that, so they asked for something that would mean they didn’t have to.

    The bill was originally written with that as the background, and they specifically added language about just trusting what was entered and not collecting identification past that.

    I got the impression that the staffers were intelligent, thoughtful people, just with no experience or knowledge of non big tech stuff. They have been living in the Apple/Microsoft/Google world like most normies. They were very surprised and intrigued when I told them that Debian collects no information on users. One said they were interested in giving Linux a try because of how bad Windows 11 is.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    And as far as I know it was written pretty much by Meta. And then we have lobbying and some law text written by a private company ends up being pushed in several states. (With minor changes.)

    I mean we happen to share some goals. I think it's great they just trust what somebody enters. It's probably there because they want more users and less barriers in the way. Bit it happens to help with privacy as well. And people don't need to scan some government ID. Same with Linux I think. They probably had someone do the numbers to find the sweet spot between enshittification and users leaving. But I won't complain if it means more Linux market share.

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