I studied at the PR in question and that's not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.

Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I'd absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user's active permission.

Basically it's a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user's hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.

Mind you, I feel there's also value in loud non-compliance and I'm glad some are taking that road -- keep it up, folks. But I'm leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.

People need to remember that slippery slope is a very specific fallacy where a hyperbolic chain of events is not backed up by supporting evidence.

If we allow gay marriage people will want to marry their dogs!

While none of us can possibly know where this ends, this is preemptive compliance with privacy invading measures that are practically indistinguishable from the kind of overreaching control desired by malicious parties. This is a much stronger case and even IF this is the last step, there's no reason to take it in the first place.

It's morally correct to loudly object at every step, that's how you fight this.

The source is the source: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/acb6624fa19ddd68f9433fb0838db119fe18c3ed

Takes a birth date for the user in ISO 8601 calendar date format. The earliest representable year is 1900. If an empty string is passed the birth date is reset to unset.

That's it. That's all it does.

Whatever was discussed in the PR, the code does precisely nothing to implement any kind of verification. It's just an optional birth date field, like tons of electronics have had forever.