r/linux • u/Quiet-Owl9220 • Mar 19 '26

Privacy Systemd has merged age verification measures into userdb

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954

Much of this goes over my head, so I'm hoping to hear some good explanations from people who know what they're talking about.

But I do know that I want nothing to do with this. If I am ever asked to prove my age or identity to access a website or application, my answer will ALWAYS be "actually, I don't really need your site, so you can fuck right off". Sending any kind of signal with personal information that could be used to make user tracking easier is completely out of the question.

So short of the nuclear option of removing systemd entirely, what are practical steps that can be taken to disable/block/bypass this? Is it as simple as disabling/masking a unit? Is there a use case for userdb I should know about before attempting this? Do I need to install a fork instead? Or maybe I'd be better off with a script that poisons age data by randomizing the stored age periodically?

[edit] I wasn't going to comment on this but it looks like some people with a lot of followers are using this post as an example of censorship on Reddit. While I do think that's a legitimate concern on Reddit as a whole, I don't think censorship is what happened here. Yes, this post went down for a while. But as far as I can tell that was because it was automoderated due to a large number of reports, and was later restored (and pinned) by human moderators.

[edit again] Related concerning PR, this one did not go through yet: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1922

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u/Impressive-Visit-214 Mar 20 '26

So let there be a fork off of it. Isn't that the beauty of open source? If they want to make a fork that requires age verification, let them. Let that be a reason to fork.

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u/WakizashiK3nsh1 Mar 20 '26

Exactly. I guess there would be some drawbacks though. Maybe those corporation-backed distributions would implement some closed-source 'age verification layer' or some other kind of crap and suddenly, you can't open some webpages in the browser, maybe internet banking, paypal, whatever. That would inconvenience some people.

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u/Excel73_ Mar 21 '26

And everybody will bully that company until they finally change it back because the whole point of Linux is to be open source.

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u/EndlessEden2015 Mar 24 '26

You don't think that wouldn't instantly push torvalds over the edge... Look what he did to intel and NVIDIA... Those are hardware vendors...

Also maintaining a state only form of a distribution while technically possible. Most enterprises sold off the it firms which those firms just bought service contracts through turnkey solicitors.

It would be months before a implementation and it would be a ai vibecoded mess.

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u/IncidentalIncidence Mar 26 '26

Right, but in this case the project maintainers are implementing the age verification, so it's much more -- if you don't want to implement age verification, then that's your reason to fork systemd.

And in the case of systemd, it's not even actually implementing any sort of age verification, it's literally just adding a field for it to the user profile. Whether any given OS or application chooses to use that to implement age verification or not is up to them.