Post

California may have passed the dumbest age verification law ever. It says the operating system has to collect your age during account setup and provide an api for apps to get your age. But you don’t do any scans, you just self report your age. You know, the way adult sites already work…

On paper, I think it would actually be nice if it wasn't mandatory (because you'd only have to enter your age once). But because it is mandatory, it's gonna be abused by the state looking for targets.

Its basically just asking for a birthdate in you user profile and trusting you not to lie. Not much to abuse there, and apps don’t need to scrape any other data than “what is user’s” age.

That's probably more true for today's kids who don't know how half the tech they use even works. My generation? We'd have gotten around that in minutes using VMs or guest accounts or some other easy workaround lol.