Is it really not as easy for them as saying “hey btw don’t use this distro if you’re in California” and fully expecting nobody to comply? I’m not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.
Also this “age bracket” thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that’s running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user’s DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It’s actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.
On the other hand, it’s one of the least intrusive proposals I’ve heard in this round of debate. The parent flags the account as a child, the browser sends one (or more, in this case) extra bit indicating if it should receive the adult content (whatever it might be) or not.
No ID verification, no face scanning, no credit card checks, no companies building profiles of everybody on earth and sharing them with shady institutions. Plus, it pushes the responsibility back to the parents, who (hopefully) know the child the best, and can adjust the restrictions either way if needed.
Now I can finally accept that the age verification issue is merely “controversial”, instead of absolutely evil global conspiracy.
Canonical seems to be based in the UK, going off of the Wikipedia page
Canonical can kiss my behind if they want to implement digital ID.
It’s not though. It’s literally asking the user “how old are you?” and not even caring if they lie. It’s not even requiring a date, just a number of years.
