Posted by todsacerdoti 6 hours ago
California is kind of strange - on the one hand giving rise to open source; on the other hand being a lobbyist's paradise.
I dunno. I don’t love it. But if a dumb age-range flag became “the thing” to check, well, that’s be less invasive than uploading an ID or something.
I don't even get why people think lobbyists hijack the law. It might be too left/progressive/socialism/or whatever. But, basically, the only major org opponent of this law is Google: https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...
Now what would happen after that?
First oses would have to implement the above in a way that could not be bypassed, pretty much impossible if the child has access to the device.
Then you would need to require that websites honor that token or any similar token no matter how it was implemented ... https MITM etc. good luck with that.
Finally once all the implementation and enforcement hurdles are complete every website out there would immediately know that the user browsing was a child and all the trackers and ad networks on the web would immediately start targeting those users because children are marks.
Now you need even more laws and regulations to protect the children from being targeted by advertising companies, and good luck with enforcing that.
But once again, I'd like to bring up my preferred solution for this problem. Ban "smartphone" (precise meaning TBD) for minors in public spaces. My belief is that it will disrupt the dopamine hits enough that it doesn't become addicting and kids don't rely on it completely to function socially. And just having it in legislature will serve as a starting point for parents to discuss the topic more openly, which will help with the network effects. Parents don't have second thoughts on why cigarettes or drugs or alcohol is bad for children, they just are, and whole groups of parents can collectively agree that their children and friends of their children should not be using them. I hope to see the same for "smartphones".
None of that addresses "if you get unlucky and some prosecutor decides to help his career by prosecuting you as an enabler-of-child-inappropriate-whatever-it-is". YOLOing away one's freedom on "probably" seems risky, and there is no reward to be had for doing it.
The only sane solution is to simply add "not for use in california" to all OSs, until California gets its collective head out of its collective rectum.
And for most applications, compliance is as simple as calling the relevant API and throwing away the return value, because most applications aren't doing anything that is already required by law to have age restrictions.
Yeah. We're talking about a law that's still over a year from taking effect. It's not going to be replaced by one having the opposite effects overnight with no warning.
> and are willing to bet you have the money to defend yourself in case you are sued wrongly
Since I don't develop or distribute applications or operating systems that are used by children, let alone software that would be legally required to behave differently when the user is a child, I'm quite confident that any lawsuit targeted at me by the State of California's elected AG would be laughed out of court at the first hearing, and I'd probably have plenty of offers of pro-bono representation. And I wouldn't even need a lawyer to help me ask to see the evidence that a child was affected by the non-compliance of the software I didn't write, and if a court did somehow get convinced, I could survive being fined the maximum fine for negligent violations with respect to at least several children. And I'm not at all concerned about receiving an injunction to not do something I'm already not doing.
Any law could be amended, or abused. Not having a law can make prosecutorial misconduct easier. I don't see anything in this law that seems more ripe for creative misinterpretation and abuse than is typical, and I don't think it likely that a California state court would cooperate with an egregious attempt to abuse this law.
You seem to be having a reaction to this law that would be triggered by being confronted with any law that isn't specified with the precise mathematical rigor necessary to appease a compiler.
Why, we could even see a legal requirement for code repositories to run one themselves, constantly scanning for compliance. That way the compute cost is offloaded properly on the citizenry :)