Age Verification Mandate at OS Level

[ionospheric]

Dear fellow Ubuntuans,

You may have heard that California has passed a law AB-1043 that requires every OS developer to add age verification on the OS level, including Canonical. Canonical would be forced to pay penalties between $2,500 to $7,500 per violation.

I was looking on the forums whether there is any discussion about this but haven’t found any thread, is there a discussion on this forum anywhere?

Thanks,

Cheers and happy coding!

[eeickmeyer]

Ubuntu's response to California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043)

Over the past couple of days, there has been a lot of commentary about Ubuntu and how it’ll respond to California’s new Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), which will require operating systems to collect age information at account setup and expose an age “signal” to eligible applications from 2027. Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how, or even whether, Ubuntu will change in response. The recen…

Ubuntu must not implement OS-level age verification or age signaling in any form

As I stated in my previous post, Canonical is still working this out with its legal department. While I appreciate your point of view, and why you might be alarmed by the apparent direction - none of that work in the installer/systemd/etc. has been done by Canonical - it’s been done by an external contributor, and we have no intention of considering implementations until we’ve had a chance to consider our actual policy on how or if we respond to the legislation.

[ian-weisser]

@eeickmeyer is quite right.

Legal questions are the realm of lawyers.

Amateurs spreading rumors and half-facts and random opinions tends to cause a lot of needless anxiety.

So we are discouraging speculation and “what-ifs” by non-lawyers simply because it’s not constructive at this time.