Mandating age verification at the operating system level fundamentally fails to protect children because it completely ignores the reality of hardware access and open-source software. Technical workarounds are trivial for the average digitally-native teenager; anyone can bypass a locked-down primary OS by simply booting a live Linux USB drive, spinning up a virtual machine, or utilizing offshore, non-compliant open-source distributions hosted on servers entirely outside of U.S. jurisdiction. Furthermore, because the internet operates globally, enforcing local OS-level blocks does nothing to prevent users from navigating the web through VPNs or proxy services that mask their origin and intercept tracking telemetry, making the entire premise of a localized OS barrier practically useless against the exact users it intends to restrict.
Beyond being technically ineffective, this approach actively undermines user safety by creating unprecedented privacy vulnerabilities and massive data honeypots. Digital rights organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have consistently demonstrated that mandatory age verification inherently requires identity verification, forcing millions of users to surrender highly sensitive data—like government IDs or biometric scans—to corporate servers. By legally requiring operating systems to build an API that constantly broadcasts age data to third-party electronic services, the legislation dramatically expands the attack surface for malicious actors and provides advertising conglomerates with a permanent, government-mandated pipeline to harvest demographic data, putting the exact demographic it claims to protect at a significantly higher risk of identity theft and corporate profiling.
@kevinthomas remember #Microsoft comtrols what boots, via #uefi so can kill #Linux as soon as legally acceptable, the guise of protecting the children and fulfilling their age gate obligation would do
