My thoughts, as someone on the internet since I was WAY too young (~7 years old) and is now watching this unfold

A few things I'd like to say:

1) This is making it harder for children to find what they love.

If it wasn't for having access to a laptop, I would not have made my own virtual machines, Minecraft mods, and as a result, not found my love for computers and technology.

Access to a computer and the things you can do on it is very special. It allows people like me to go on sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, and explore what our interests are. The brain is still developing at this age, and my neurons have made their connections with this knowledge I have picked up. I am so glad that I had this opportunity, because now I am about to graduate high school, going into college with a great foundation in what I already know. And I have already done so much in the open source space, across so many projects. All that time could be wasted for future generations.

So anytime there is an attempt to place restrictions on people using technology, it mildly bothers me. I think that if a parent does their parenting, you don't have to worry about exposure to obviously bad content. It means one thing if this is a part of some online service, like YouTube, where it is trying to recenter content that is more appropriate (though, unfortunately, the kind of content you see on YouTube Kids is brainrot).

When you are bringing this to an **operating system**, then that makes everything harder to work with. If a young adolescent is interested in, say, rock music, then it can be difficult to listen to some songs because of the profanity, which is probably another thing that people want children to avoid seeing.

As for the "protect the children", maybe it should be "protect the children whose parents cannot tell them how to use the internet safely"? Just like a kid should know not to walk into a "bad neighborhood", they should know not to visit a "bad website".

2) The enforcement and "now what"

Developers can use the information, but then what? A calculator is still going to be a calculator. A movie application is still going to show movies. Even the example I just mentioned about music makes no sense, because how would you make sure each song is "clean"?

I think the ultimate goal of the bill was to make the politicians feel happy. They obviously have no idea about how easy it is to bypass age restrictions, and they certainly have no idea how an operating system works. Honestly, if someone makes a first log-in experience that asks for age, and then it closes and does nothing - not even save the data - that would be enough.

We will probably end up with video games refusing to open, or browsers refusing to access certain websites just based on whatever info is given. As for application developers, I honestly think they will do nothing. California is probably not going to spend tax dollars on running through each possible type of application, each implementation of said application, map out which is a "risk to children" and then take action.

3) If this does go into effect and is enforced, the D-Bus route is actually not bad.

It would prevent each application from needing their own verification system, and instead just give a source that can be referred to. This way, there isn't age information being stored in a million databases and decreases risk of said database being breached, which in my opinion makes this data more secure.