In recent weeks, the Linux community has focused heavily on the debate surrounding new legislation in parts of the United States, including California’s AB-1043 and Colorado’s SB26-051. In short, these measures introduce stricter age-verification requirements for certain online services and raise questions about how Linux systems could adapt to this.
In an attempt to address the complicated case, a merge request was submitted to the XDG specifications maintained by freedesktop.org. The proposal recommended adding a new D-Bus interface, org.freedesktop.AgeVerification, to allow applications to query the operating system for a user’s age bracket.
The intent was to provide applications with a general age category rather than an exact birth date. The proposed API defined five categories: Unknown, Under 13, 13–15, 16–17, and 18+. The draft specification stated that the user’s birth year would be stored locally, and only the calculated age bracket would be accessible to applications through methods such as GetAgeBracket.
The plan was for the data to be stored in the AccountsService user configuration directory (/var/lib/AccountsService/users/), ensuring the underlying information remained private while applications accessed only the derived age category.
However, expectably, the proposal quickly drew criticism from developers and community members. Concerns included privacy implications, embedding jurisdiction-specific policies into the desktop infrastructure, and whether this functionality should be part of the freedesktop core namespace.
Some also argued that linking the specification to the freedesktop namespace could create reputational risks by associating a core desktop standard with politically sensitive regulations.
So, at the end, the author just closed the merge request and indicated that future work would take place within the portal infrastructure used by technologies such as Flatpak. However, the question remains open, as no clear statements have yet been made about how Linux and the open-source community will respond to this challenge.
What a world….