Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws
in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...
There’s a big difference. Name and email fields were agreed upon by the community itself because they might be useful. This is not decided by the community, it’s enforced. What if the law asked for a mandatory “skin colour” field? Yeah no problem, right? let’s comply, after all we can put any colour we like there.
But we must look not just at what’s happening now, we must look at what happens later. What if the next law enforces actual 3rd-party age verification? “It shouldn’t be a problem for you Linux people, you already have an API in place after all”.
Again, it has nothing to do with systemd, and they aren’t enforcing anything. You’re just making shit up to get angry at. They are only providing a place to put the information that users (distro providers) can collect (or not collect) and use however they want. You should be grateful systemd is doing this because I can’t imagine how ridiculous whatever solution all the lazy activists complaining about it would think up. It would ofc be no solution because the only thing those people can do is performative outrage from the top of the Dunning Kruger curve. If the next law enforces verification it still won’t be systemd’s problem because the only thing forcing end users to provide that info will be the distro providers, not systemd.
Also just because it’s such an hilariously vapid argument against this PR, I fully endorse and support systemd adding a skin color data field. No distro will ask me to set it, no program will try to read it, and I will make it “kumquat”.
There’s a big difference. Name and email fields were agreed upon by the community itself because they might be useful. This is not decided by the community, it’s enforced. What if the law asked for a mandatory “skin colour” field? Yeah no problem, right? let’s comply, after all we can put any colour we like there.
But we must look not just at what’s happening now, we must look at what happens later. What if the next law enforces actual 3rd-party age verification? “It shouldn’t be a problem for you Linux people, you already have an API in place after all”.
Again, it has nothing to do with systemd, and they aren’t enforcing anything. You’re just making shit up to get angry at. They are only providing a place to put the information that users (distro providers) can collect (or not collect) and use however they want. You should be grateful systemd is doing this because I can’t imagine how ridiculous whatever solution all the lazy activists complaining about it would think up. It would ofc be no solution because the only thing those people can do is performative outrage from the top of the Dunning Kruger curve. If the next law enforces verification it still won’t be systemd’s problem because the only thing forcing end users to provide that info will be the distro providers, not systemd.
Also just because it’s such an hilariously vapid argument against this PR, I fully endorse and support systemd adding a skin color data field. No distro will ask me to set it, no program will try to read it, and I will make it “kumquat”.
You complain to your lawmakers and make them change the law.
Shitting on systemd or the maintainers does exactly nothing