If you have not been living under a rock, then you most likely know that age verification has been all over tech news lately, and the conversation surrounding it is a mess with a lot of information and misinformation flowing around.

For people who are trying to understand what’s going on, the TLDR is that laws in regions like California, Colorado, and Brazil now require operating systems to report age signals to apps and app stores.

systemd, the init system and service manager used by most major Linux distributions, has made a change tied to this whole situation, but it is probably not what you are imagining.

What’s going on?

this is a screenshot of an accepted merge request on systemd's github repo that is titled: userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records #40954

The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil.

This is the same record that already holds basic user metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location. The field stores a full date in YYYY-MM-DD format and can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves.

Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is:

An optional field in the userdb JSON object. It’s not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it’s standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it’s entirely optional.

In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide.

A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here.

So yeah, that is what this change looks like, but this won’t be stopping the haters and conspiracy theorists from making wild accusations, of course. Let’s see how this develops.

Suggested Read 📖: Systemd creator quits Microsoft

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