2026-09-28
Age verification laws: where things stand
Two age-verification laws have been the subject of arguments on Linux for months. Here is where they actually stand.
California. The Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043, signed October 13, 2025, effective January 1, 2027) would have made every operating system ask for the user’s age at account setup and expose an age-bracket signal to apps. After pushback from open-source developers and the EFF, AB 1856 amended it: an “operating system provider” no longer includes anyone distributing an operating system under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software. The Assembly passed it 68-1, the Senate 39-0, and it was chaptered on September 1,
- GPL, MIT, BSD and Apache licensed systems — Linux, the BSDs — are out of scope. California backed out for us.
Brazil. The Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents (ECA Digital, Law 15.211/2025) has been in force since March 17, 2026. It applies to any IT product or service likely to be accessed by children in Brazil, no matter where it was developed, requires reliable age verification — self-declaration is explicitly not enough — and has no open-source exemption. The ANPD has been monitoring age assurance in app stores and operating systems since March; sanctions start in November 2026. Brazil did not back out.
systemd. In March, systemd merged a birthDate field into its
userdb JSON user records (PR #40954, merged March 18), citing these very
laws. The revert was proposed the next day and the thread was locked the
same day as “too heated”. That field is systemd’s own userdb; consumers
include the still-draft age verification portal in xdg-desktop-portal.
What about Horizon? Horizon is already systemd-free, and has been since I found out about it while I was maintaining Antergos NeXT. There is no userdb to patch, no birthdate field to store, and nothing that talks an OS-level age signal.
Will Horizon be required to comply? My answer: no. Fuck the law. I don’t live in Brazil — I literally do not care. I’d rather not get hate over it either way.