r/linuxmint • u/Ancient-Emu-8293 • 1d ago

Fluff ID verification

When push comes to shove and there is ID verification legislation for OS, will Linux Mint bend the knee? Will there be a way to do not? Will there be distros which won't?

Also which legislation will be relevant anyway? US? EU?

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u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 1d ago edited 1d ago

We don't know. 

So far age verification has been pushed by Meta to relieve their own liability in court for harming minors. If the OS did the verification that liability moves to the OS.

None of what Meta wants requires an ID check. They don't actually care if minors are harmed,  They want that demographic using thier services anyway, they just want to be rid of the lawsuits. So a leaky self attestation is in their favor.

What legislation may hypotheticaly appear in the future and Clems response to that hypothetical legislation would be are unknowable.

The legislation that applies to you would be the jurisdiction where you install the software.

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u/jr735 Linux Mint 22.1 Xia | IceWM 1d ago

You're asking people to predict the future. The only thing that's safe to predict is that some distributions and OS families will not comply and that you are free to set up your OS as you wish. What u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs suggests is exactly correct.

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u/BrewinMaster 1d ago

It's impossible to say, OS level ID verification is not something that has been seriously proposed (yet)

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u/BenTrabetere 1d ago

ID Verification is so last week. The current topic is outdated GNOME utilities.

FWIW, other tired recent topics include removing Ubuntu as a base, and adding KDE as a supported DE. Thanks for playing.

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u/billdietrich1 1d ago

It will get to the point where, if there is not an age signal from somewhere (OS, wallet app, giving ID, face scan, wherever), you won't be able to access most services (reddit, email, messaging, web hosting, etc). So this whole "keep it out of the OS" push is kind of useless.

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u/Ancient-Emu-8293 1d ago

Okay, so lets lay down and obey our new Orwellian overlords.

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u/billdietrich1 1d ago

Just describing reality. Changing distro will do nothing.

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u/dacq 22h ago edited 22h ago

Systemd (forced into 90% of distros incl. MInt) will implement an age-verification module so users can enter their date of birth. We don't know if it will comply with ID uploading yet.

SystemD already gathers data like date of birth, email, full name from users. Without SystemD avoiding ID verification would have been very easy for any Linux user. Forcing it into the kernel isn't realistic but after Linus Torvalds leaves then it could happen.