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AB-1043 “Age verification signals: software applications and online services.”
Text https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
Other info https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043
California AB 1043 signed. Mandatory os-level, device-level, app store, and even developer-required age verification for all computing devices.
Edit: altered title from “ID check” to “Age Verification check”
Please update your title to remove the misinformation about the bill, specifically calling it “OS-level ID verification” is not even close. It’s not got anything to do with personally identifying information or any actual verification of age information.
It’s actually an incredibly privacy conscious method of doing what it is trying to do, which is to allow parents to set up a child’s account with their age information on a device and have that age bracket information passed to websites and applications. That way, it makes it harder for a child to bypass age-restrictions, but without requiring dangerous age verification methods such as ID or face scans.
Bullshit. This is not a voluntary thing that parents can choose to do or not: it is an enforced, mandatory requirement that is foisted upon literally all programs, regardless of user choice or whether it makes any sense at all to do so. Oh, and there’s a penalty of TWO HOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS for EACH VIOLATION for EACH CHILD.
Download a foreign video app on your smart TV that doesn’t comply? Congrats, the pigs will fine a three-child family $7500 for the crime of watching manga.
You live in the US. You know that this will be unequally applied to the poor and minorities. You know that this will be used as an excuse to search people’s devices at massive scale. You know that companies will simply shrug and use face ID anyway, because they already have to do it for other locales, so why not just reuse the same process? You know that this is a foot in the door for the facists and capitalists. You know all this, so stop running interference for them.
The law has no way to go after parents, unless there’s already some law on the books that does so and the penalties defined in this one somehow apply to that.
The penalties defined in this law are for OS providers not having a way to set age data within an account on a device or for not sending the age signal when requested and for developers ignoring the age signal or not requesting it.
If you want parental controls, you can have them.
If you want parental controls with root, you can have those too.
They exist currently.
I have edited the title to include “age verification checks” from “ID check”.
It’s better but the only place the word verification, or anything like it, actually appears in the text is in the title and in the introduction. It doesn’t have any verification in it, just passing whatever you tell your device to other systems it interacts with.
I wish the politicians were honest about what it does. Accepting this makes it seem like we’re ok with verification because that’s what’s in the title, but it’s possible to be both supportive of requiring some type of standard parental control system and be against any sort of age verification.
Think about how much it must take for parents to set up age controls on every single individual app and service their kids use. Having the ability to set up an account for your child on their phone or laptop and know that appropriate controls for that age range will be automatically applied will make it so many more parents will do so than they do now.
This is a good thing because we don’t want what they’ve got in the UK, which is requiring this patchwork of age verification from websites and apps to avoid liability. We want it to be the responsibility of parents, so that we as adults can once again browse freely and no longer be asked to input our birthday to “verify” we are old enough to see a list of beers the local brewery has on tap.