Post #2468770

There's also a very obvious reason why you see so many posts/articles/toots about it – and yes, a lot of them include misrepresented/wrong information, fear mongering and clickbait titles. Everybody is already on edge because of the 'age verification' stuff that's taking place all around the world. And like a lot of people, I also thought "well, if Windows/macOS asks for my ID, at least there's always Linux". Seeing some big Linux-adjacent projects not only refusing to react to it with anything other than "absolutely not, go fuck yourself" but even accepting PRs and discussing how best to comply with those laws really breaks my heart. And even if the aforementioned PRs do not 'verify' anything, the communication from systemd developers has been lackluster. From the politics standpoint, even if I did think that a 'birthDate' field was useful, I would either have asked the author to reword his PR (because it has nothing to do with the "age verification laws" and wording it this way would obviously create a huge shitstorm online, which it did), or made a public announcement explaining the change and assuring the users that systemd will never try to 'verify' your age.