Post #2392298

2026-03-21 09:04 UTC

@Khrys@mamot.fr I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is exactly the right way to comply with that law: an optional birth date field. You don't want to have to submit an idea to your OS or implement facial recognition, and you certainly don't want to tie account creation to external services for those things, but now parents can fill in the birth date for their kids, and everybody else can ignore it. This kind of thing needs to be in the hands of parents, not external companies. So I don't really see the problem here.

Replies (5)

@mcv@friendica.opensocial.space 2026-03-21 09:07

@Khrys@mamot.fr The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal. What the hell is the issue here? Do you need to be a member of an organization to submit a PR? And if the lack of organisational backing would be a problem, why is it a problem that the people merging it do work for an organisation? The only thing that matters is that an official committer approves it. This whole article sounds like pointless fear mongering. If there's anything else to it that I'm missing, I'd love for someone to explain it.

Open ##2392299
@julesbl@mastodon.me.uk 2026-03-21 09:21

@mcv @Khrys@mamot.fr I do, it was done unilaterally without discussion. Even if it was technically correct and maybe we need to look at this, a single person making the decision and forcing it into the code is not the way this should be done.

Open ##2392301
@liquor_american@universeodon.com 2026-03-21 15:30

@mcv @Khrys@mamot.fr Never heard of a slippery slope? It's a longstanding tradition in our legal system. Start with something that seems innocuous enough. Then when enough people have been lulled into complacency by arguments like yours, the law changes into something onerous and we're stuck dealing with that. It's very basic stuff.

Open ##2392311
@andymoose@fedi.aiga.rocks 2026-03-22 00:54

@mcv @Khrys@mamot.fr The problem is that they’ve acquiesced to a poorly thought out and bad faith trial balloon of a law. So now the lawmakers know that it’s game on. The next version of the law will be even more insidious and require actual verification and do who knows what else.

Open ##2392314
@osma@mas.to 2026-03-22 09:31

Say there's a law requiring collection of people's ethnicity. Or of their gender, allowing only two options. Or of their religion. Or legal, government issued names and id numbers. Oh, they're all optional in most jurisdictions and in fact defined in ways that are noncompliant with other laws. But what's the big deal? We'll just add an optional field name to standardize the schema. There's no mandatory mechanism or verification. Just making the data cleaner. @mcv @Khrys@mamot.fr

Open ##2392315