California Assembly: Your "Hello World" Needs Age Verification
On October 13th California's Assembly passed Bill 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act. This bill is insane. Most of the attention is currently focused on the requirements it places on operating system developers, namely to ask a user how old they are. This alone is a breach of privacy and violates the rights of free expression of developers, but it isn't the worst part of the new law.
Only a small portion of software developers work on operating systems. However, the law places obligations on all application developers. Specifically, paragraph 1798.502 (b) orders developers that haven't already asked for a user's age to "request a signal from a covered application store with respect to that user before July 1, 2027."
The law defines a developer as anyone who "owns, maintains, or controls an application" where an application is "a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application." This would seem to include all software, from Snapchat to curl.
In the typical constitution-dodging fasion of modern Americal legislatures, the law relies on harsh civil penalties to punish violators, which in this case could include anyone in California who publishes software. The text of the bill is extremely vague, not defining what counts as an "operating system" or "software application." It displays technical ineptitude beyond lawmakers' usual naïveté.
Bill 1043 is already a template for similar laws in other states like Colorado. It is clearly an attempt for politicians with authoritarian aspirations to get their foot in the door of universal government identification of computer users. Companies like System76 are already capitulating and government officials will use this momentum to pressure them into ultimately enacting formal ID verification.
The correct response for these companies is to refuse to do business in California or any other state that enacts similar legislation, or work with anyone in these states. Obviously, however, this would be incredibly painful for a tech-focused company like System76. The alternative, however, is much worse: open-source operating systems are incompatible with government-mandated user identification and U.S. governments will not shy away from banning them entirely.
Computer users who care about their civil rights should see this for what it is: a strategic escalation in the war on software freedom that has been brewing for years. The plan is simple: youth autonomy is so unthinkable that people will give up their most basic freedoms to prevent it. These politicians want every piece of code running on a computer to bear their stamp of approval, earned by meticulously monitoring and restricting user activities.
For the sake of you and those more vulnerable than you, do not allow them to do this. If an app demands that you provide documentation or biometric data to "verify your age," refuse and find alternatives. Insist on using open-source software. Insist on encrypting your data and never give up your keys to anyone. Defending your liberty was never going to be easy—many people already died for it—so losing a few friends or turning back at a border today is better than the alternative: watching as your neighbors, coworkers, role models and family vanish off the streets and wondering whether you're next.
