[NTLUG:Discuss] age verification in systemd

[David Good]

So the anti-systemd crowd is slowly being proven right ? They were always
concerned that systemd was centralizing things too much and making the
system into a tool managing the user rather than the other way round .
These concerns only grew louder when Pottering went to Microsoft .

To be fair to Pottering , his work has definitely changed the Linux tools
and experience to be a lot more "modern" , though the question remains
whether or not it's "better" .

--David

On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 5:10 PM stuart yarus <syarus at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> From distrowatch dot com / weekly.php?issue=20260323#news:
>
> "Last week we talked about age verification laws
> <https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20260316#qa>, what they are and
> the issues surrounding these surveillance efforts. This week a new age
> tracking feature was added to systemd
> <https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954>: "[This change] stores the
> user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in
> California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
> The xdg-desktop-portal project is adding an age verification portal
> <https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922> that needs a
> data
> source for the user's age. userdb already stores personal metadata
> (emailAddress, realName, location) so birthDate is a natural fit." The
> birthdate field can be set by the administrator only, but can be read by
> the user and the user's applications. "
>
> "Update: Following strong feedback from the community, an attempt was made
> to revert the change <https://distrowatch.com/<a href=>. The attempted
> reversal of the change includes a comment: "Introducing birth date storage
> or age queries (even local-only) creates a new class of sensitive user data
> in the OS that didn't exist before. It risks normalizing permission-like
> checks inside the desktop session and could be extended to far more
> invasive controls in the future." The reversal was denied by project leader
> Pottering, who insists the tracking feature will remain. "
>
>
> --
> Stuart Yarus
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>