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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • This might be the most anemic open ended bill I have ever read. On its face, it has no teeth. The most well defined portions of the bill are to make sure that applications have access to age data. Making this look more like a way for corporations to gather data and verify real people as opposed to online personas.

    There is zero regulation actually defined and instead they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented. The bill could pass tomorrow and we still wouldn’t know what age verification looks like.

    As scary as these efforts are, they are also a bit humorous to me. By and large software exists independently of its creator, especially in the FOSS space. There would be no way to require an individual to install an OS that supported this or even use an updated browser that supported it.

    Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step. This presents as OS level, but you have to give people a reason to upgrade in order to implement. If Wikipedia suddenly required some sort of OS based age verification protocol to access its content, it would become a lot harder to avoid.

    They are putting this at the OS level, but I think this is a way to back into removing anonymous access to the Internet.