this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
653 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
82285 readers
4522 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But it actually does require that. Read section 1798.502.b. Every developer of every application has to ask for your age bracket through this mechanism. The open source developers behind ‘ls’, ‘cp’, ‘rsync’ are all suddenly required to ask my age category of face a $2500-$7500 fine per time my kids run apt upgrade. That is utterly absurd.
Hell, I’m suddenly liable if a kid downloads my pong example project that I put up on crates.io or PyPI?!?
Yea they have to ask for your age bracket. That's not the same as an ID.
I agree, the definition of an application is much too broad. And should be revised. But the difficulty is how do you restrict it without also creating a multitude of loopholes for businesses to exploit. At the very least we should restrict it to applications whose primary purpose is to interact with the internet.
And before you say it, yes I am aware that that still leaves many apps like curl, wget, ssh being covered. But it could be a start.
Or maybe just restrict it to social media applications. I am not a lawyer, I definitely don't have a great grasp of how to create the type of language that is appropriate for laws.
But why are you even accepting this something like this should exist? What is the threat model that this is protecting against? How would it offer any protection against that threat? Why should everyone who is making any program need to ask about the age of their possible users?