Nobody gives a fuck about your weaseling technicalities. The salient fact is that this change was made in order to "comply in advance" with totalitarian fuckery. It SIGNALS POLITICAL SUPPORT for it, and that's not okay!
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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I studied at the PR in question and that's not the conclusion I arrive at. Let me try to explain how this looks to me.
Also keep in mind, I do think we absolutely need to keep the political pressure on and push back on identity-gating policies with all our collective might. In that light the PR itself does the two things I'd absolutely require here: one, it allows the user to put whatever value they want in that field, including none at all, and two, it disallows all apps from reading that field without the user's active permission.
Basically it's a superficially valid implementation of a bullshit requirement that still leaves all the power in the user's hands and therefore renders the requirement meaningless. Or in other words, a huge middle finger to the proponents of age-checking.
Mind you, I feel there's also value in loud non-compliance and I'm glad some are taking that road -- keep it up, folks. But I'm leery of demands that only one single approach be taken. This needs to be fought on every front we can. And to me the PR in question reads like an effective defensive move.
That's something I wondered about the person who implemented this too, I wonder if it was an attempt to install a bare minimum to say "There. We did it. Leave us alone." Instead of leaving it up to the government to force the issue, and he's getting absolutely raked over the coals for it.
If that's the case, I feel terribly bad about this backfiring so hard on him. I do think we should be putting up a lot more resistance before resorting to something like this though.
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Hell no, we didn't fall for anything. This is a real problem with real and far-reaching consequences, associated to multiple legislative attacks against privacy etc, pushed by corporates and religious groups.
YOU fell for the "think of the children" lie and "It's just a text field" BS. No, this is far worse than just a text field.
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Thereβs a disconnect over this in that one side looks at the present data and other takes a possible result from that into account. (dividing people into groupsβ¦for the sake of argument ok?)
Now from strictly an IT perspective, this is indeed pretty meaningless. One line of code that stores one piece of data. Who cares right?
From the other side you take the very hot topics of politics and privacy into account (two things that are also very front and center with most of the Lemmy crowd afaik).
Because it can start by just one line of code but where will it end? Personally Iβd rather be over cautious and assume the worst.
I mean look at the story of cookies. Back in the 90βs they were a small benign piece of data and look how that turned out. Our entire world is influenced by it today to great extend.
Personally Iβd rather be overly cautious.
People need to remember that slippery slope is a very specific fallacy where a hyperbolic chain of events is not backed up by supporting evidence.
If we allow gay marriage people will want to marry their dogs!
While none of us can possibly know where this ends, this is preemptive compliance with privacy invading measures that are practically indistinguishable from the kind of overreaching control desired by malicious parties. This is a much stronger case and even IF this is the last step, there's no reason to take it in the first place.
It's morally correct to loudly object at every step, that's how you fight this.
The thing to also keep in mind is that this shit is pushed now by Facebook and politicians, none of whom care a single shit about kids, as they so loudly claim. That alone is a huge red flag as it's always "but think about the poor children!!" that is used for the most nefarious shit being pushed.
This has been in the works for a long time (I've seen attempts for this at least a decade ago) and now it finally passed in some places,. meaning that it only got easier to soon implement it everywhere
Yes, it's a slippery slope argument but that slope is right there in front of us
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Couldn't reply to me pointing out that this was merged, and was stated to be explicitly to support age verification laws, so you had to lie about it as a meme instead.
Because thats what youre doing right now, lying and spreading misinformation. You can admit it.
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I foresee an astronomical amount of people born at unix epoch to appear if it becomes a required field lol
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"It is too late, for I have already straw-manned your argument in a meme"
reads comments
Umm, I think they can read.
Storing a users birthday is useful metadata anyway. I'm surprised it wasn't stored before.
The age isn't verified is any way. You can set it to the 1800s for all it cares
Yeah like the email address and the full name of the user.
... What do you mean it's blank for 99% of users?
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source? i mean you went through the effort to post a meme about it at least include the relevant information
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