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California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Right... But in the age of AI, data-harvesting the right data (i.e. the human/non-AI-slop) becomes very interesting to a lot of companies, "age-verification" is an easy argument (for policy-makers) of e.g. social-media companies to know whether the user is an actual human, thus the verified data is a lot more valuable.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, but we can't make the argument that everyone vouching for age verification is doing so for the same reason.

    It is undeniable that there is a very large, and growing, population of parents and adults that want age restrictions for adult content. I think their concern is valid, too. However, they don't care how it's done.

    That's where big tech "saves the day" by generously offering to collect all of our IDs and tying it the our accounts. Secure, and private, age verification can be done with zero knowledge proofs. But that probably won't happen without competent government

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago*

    IIRC from past reading, the driving factor behind the California bill was that some places were passing laws that would have placed responsibility for age verification on websites. Meta

    probably correctly assessing that anything they did was going to be defeatable and not wanting to engage in a big fight with regulators over that

    drove the California effort to create an OS-level responsibility. It's not that this especially solves anything from the standpoint of people who want age restrictions, but that it dumps the legal problems on the OS vendors, like Apple and Microsoft, instead of on Meta.

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