Age Checks Creep Into Linux, systemd Locks It in, Developer Defends Himself

PiMuNu writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification/?td=rt-3a

From TFA:

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.

Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records." It's a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user's date of birth.

[...] The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.

[...] The TBOTE findings suggest that Meta is the biggest donor behind the lobbying for these age-verification laws and the App Store Accountability Act (ACCA). TBOTE claims it has directly traced more than $25 million, and that Meta could have spent upward of $2 billion on this over the last year. It also points to 10 million-plus spent lobbying in Europe.

In the US, the main group pushing for these laws is the relatively young Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA). As right-wing think tank the "Institute for Family Studies" reported a year ago, this was assembled by over 50 conservative groups. Six months later, in July 2025, Bloomberg also reported that Meta was funding the DCA. For such a young and small organization, the DCA certainly seems to have had a rapid and almost disproportionate impact.

Nuff said.

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert:

In March of 2026, systemd, the init system that boots most modern Linux distributions, merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user database. The stated purpose was compliance with California's AB-1043, Colorado's SB26-051, and Brazil's Lei 15.211/2025, a wave of age verification laws requiring operating systems to collect birth dates from users at account setup, then feed that data to app stores via a real-time API. The PR was submitted by a contributor using the GitHub handle dylanmtaylor. Within days it had 945 comments and was locked by maintainers. Someone opened a revert PR. Lennart Poettering closed it without merging on March 19th, saying the field is optional and systemd "enforces zero policy." The birthDate field is still in systemd. systemd PR #40954 revert PR #41179

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

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