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United States law that would require all operating systems to implement mandatory age verification is now available to read.
The bill is ironically titled the Parents Decide Act rather than the Government Decides Act. It applies to all operating systems; Windows, Linux, embedded systems, even smart refrigerators. Developers will have full access to all relevant personal data.
The bill doesn't even specify how age verification will work and instead delegates this task to the FTC, which will also specify data storage/protection requirements. The law wiould be considered in effect one year from date it is enacted and violations will be handled under the Federal Trade Commission Act.
„Child protection“ laws like this have no good justification and simply amount to destroying anonymity on the internet. What benefit does anybody get from such a law anyway? I can't see any. If operating systems are so bad for 17 year olds, why don't parents just take their kids' phones away? How does 17 year olds using operating systems create negative externalities for other people? I'm not seeing what I'm supposed to be gaining from these laws. It seems like lazy parents have teamed up with law enforcement who hate anonymous internet usage to demand that governments destroy internet privacy under the thin veneer of protecting teenagers from nothing.
The steelman is that it will incentivize minors to run custom operating systems so they can watch porn, and they might learn something in the process both about tech and the government.
More seriously, the only reason besides utterly incompetence anyone could have to enact such a law is that they want to create a dystopia out of RMS's worst nightmares.
This law would be moot as long as people have the freedom to decide what software they run. At the moment, there are both walled gardens and platforms which with you can mess as much as you want. While anyone can buy a Raspberry Pi for a couple of bucks and run whatever software they want, kids can simply opt for a distribution which does not try to babysit them. Or run
systemctl disable babysitd, for that matter. So you would need to mandate TPM chips in every device with more than four kilobytes of address space or something. Good luck with that.And of course this would be required, but not yet sufficient on its own. How can an operating system know if the person in front of it is a minor or not? With AI, facial recognition can be tricked. Of course, the government could helpfully implant RFID chips in citizens to help the poor OSes figuring out who is who. I think the traditional location would be the forehead.
The internet has the advantage over real life that if you find yourself in a situation which makes you uncomfortable, you can just turn off the screen without having to learn how to dissociate first. Nor is this the purpose of such laws -- someone who prefers not to see unsolicited dick picks can use messenger apps which have options to block those. The purpose of such laws is to control what kind of content minors are allowed to search for. Like the internet, reality is not safe for children. Any ten-year-old riding a bike in traffic is just one bad decision away from a life-altering accident. However, kids (or those who make it, anyhow) thrive in conditions which are not entirely safe.
This is the direction the wind blows. I think it's almost inevitable. Phones, tablets and laptops are basically there already (TPM/secure boot/ect.), the one thing missing is that the boot loader on a few phones and most laptops isn't locked yet. But it will be, soon, just like the phones. The industry wants it that way, and politics wants it, too.
The next steps are easy. The only bootable OS on those devices comes with age checks and a locked app ecosystem. The only browsers available will cooperate. Then websites will be required to implement hand shakes dependent on keys in the TPM, and only serve data to valid devices.
And sure, you'll be able to get around it for a while, especially on niche hardware. But if industry and politics cooperate, getting onto Instagram will soon be as difficult as getting a 4K Netflix stream on a "custom operating system" (i.e. only by the grace of Usenet/torrents).
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Nevertheless, it's bipartisan and it's coming. We should have full 1984 by 2034, so not bad for a government program.
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