California will require all operating systems to report an account holders' age

Assembly Bill 1043 will go into effect starting January 1st, 2027. This bill requires operating system providers to collect the birth date of the user at the stage of account creation. All operating systems are affected by this: Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, and so on. This comes at a time where age verification is increasing in popularity at an alarming rate. Luckily this isn't as bad as other bills being introduced right now (see the UK's Online Safety Act). However, it causes an entirely new set of problems.

The new act was passed unanimously and doesn't seem all that problematic on paper. When setting up an account, the primary device user will be required to indicate their birth date or age in some way. This doesn't require an actual ID or biometrics scan, rather just inputting this data. This alleviates a lot of privacy concerns, doesn't it?

This is still problematic though. Operating systems will be required to expose an API which groups the user into an age bracket (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 18, and 18 or older). Software developers are required to utilize these APIs should they want to include content in their app that is not appropriate for all ages. According to this law, developers would have the ability to inquire a users' age from the OS, thus having to take responsibility that their content is appropriate for this individual.

How will open source systems deal with this? You can easily modify Linux source code to not include this check. And how would this be enforced with community-developed distributions? These questions stay unanswered for now. Whether they will be clarified before this bill takes effect is currently unclear. Until then it is likely that such operating systems may simply disallow users from California to install them.