It saddens me that someone who is willing to stand so strongly against an oppressive law would work to discourage discussion about those laws on free social platforms.
I hope you can consider your words next time and we can enter into a good faith discussion over the merits and demerits of any law.
I appreciate the insight. And you are right, that was my lack of understanding about how it could be struck down in court.
I do want to talk briefly on your point about these other devices where the law might actually apply since I have seen a few people bring up this point.
I the definition of an OS provider the law asserts that an OS is “computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.” (emphasis mine)
To me this clearly excludes those other types of devices because routers, tvs, etc are not general purpose.
As far as public computers I think that is a really good point and speaks to the vagueness of the law. There is no clear direction on how that works in such a common use case.
Coming from the engineering side as well and I’ve put more time, thought, and effort into project proposals than it feels like they put into this law.
I fully agree. None of this should be required to operate a computer. We should focus on the parents that give their children free range of the internet without teaching them anything and the school ciriculum which is lacking in this department as well.
To me it feels like the lawmakers have some good intentions with this law, but it was rushed through so quickly that they forgot to ask themselves how this actually would be applied and who they are actually trying to protect.
Edit: oh. Also I just wanted to point out that outside of the title and abstract the law does not use the word verify/verification. It just says “indicate” which is way too vague.
Totally a valid point.
Just to clarify I am not for this law. I do not think that this should have been passed. But also the law seems to have some good intentions and I don’t want to jump to conclusions after just reading headlines.
It feels like the law makers want to standardize and restrict how this age verification works without actually providing any guidance whatsoever on how to implement such a system.
I’m curious to see what systems companies come up with and what major flaws they will have (intentional or not) that data collectors will exploit.
This actually speaks to one of the concerning things about this law. There is a section forbidding developers from collecting additional information (unless they have confident information that your age is incorrect). But there is no such clause for OS providers.
Developers shall not “Request more information from an operating system provider or a covered application store than the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title.”
Or
“Share the signal with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.”
This means that discord could not collect IDs or face scans without confidence that your age is incorrect. But windows can still require whatever they want.
But I guess silver lining is that neither of them can sell or even share the data with 3rd parties. Pretty minimal silver lining though.
That’s a really good point. It feels like they intended for that to be up to OS providers to determine. But really that was the lawmakers’ job to define. My assumption is that this law was rushed.
No doubt the law is hopeful and leaves out many details in regards to how such a system could/would/might be implemented.
But I am not seeing anything in the law that would be unconstitutional. But I’m not a lawyer so what do I know.
FYI, I am not a lawyer.
Have you actually read the bill itself? Nowhere in it does it mention any of the things that you mentioned. It doesn’t even mention ID cards at all.
What it does say is operating system providers shall “Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device”. What we should look out for is that the law does not forbid OS providers from requiring IDs.
It does however require that OS providers “Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.” (emphasis mine)
I wonder how much this is news outlets overreacting to a proposed bill that is not actually that bad, or if this is some marketing against the bill by some Corp.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
This was passed and signed last October. Why is this just hitting the news cycle?