@Suiseiseki @yrrsinn @cy @jpaskaruk

> The birth date field will require entering sensitive personal information (your DoB), instead of being able to leave it empty like the room number.
> There's no way in hell systemd will make it optional once the implementation is finalized.

This is already a slippery slope fallacy. And even if the field were non optional during account creation, it would at most be a minor inconvenience to enter "01.01.1970" when you don't want to fill in your real DoB.

> Such proprietary restrictions should not be implemented - parents should be responsible for ensuring their children don't browse proprietary porn, not the OS.

Nothing proprietary about a simple data field in the user database whose value the admin has control over.

This could be a very simple way for parents to take that responsibility: Setting up a separate account for the kid with the kid's DoB (or approximate DoB if you're paranoid) so web browsers can tell visited websites whether the user's age is >= N.

What else do you expect of the parents? Not let their 14 year old ever use a web browser unsupervised? Set up a much more sophisticated parental control system that 99% of parents don't have the skill to set up?

DoB in OS user account is so dirt easy (with web browser and websites cooperating to block access to porn etc.) that I'm now honestly wondering why this was never done before. This should have been a standard feature in any desktop OS since 40 years ago.

It wouldn't surprise me if one of the main reasons this was never considered before is that porn sites aren't willing to cooperate. They know that a good portion of their ad revenue comes from minors so they don't want anything more than a simple "are you 18" popup -- which they ideally don't want either, and always make as easy to skip as possible, like with a big green YES button and no explanation or warning to kids about the fact that they could become addicted or develop a taste for violent or degrading content or the like.

> Popups asking if you're 18 actually does turn away some kids.

Let's not kid ourselves. But sure, even 0.001% is technically "some."

> Asking for a specific DoB is not even needed for such restrictions - all is really needed is birth year or birth year and month.

And there's nothing preventing the admin from entering 01 as the day, or day and month. The admin can decide just how approximate they want the data to be. Could round up or down to half year, quarter, etc. Just make the field a standard Y/M/D field and the admin has full control.

> He's a microsoft developer - everything he does is with malice and the intention of causing harm, therefore a mug shot is pretty weak - instead he really should be hunted down.

LOL, come on. It really doesn't matter who commits a piece of code, if the code itself is harmless.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of desktop OSs having a DoB field in user accounts, and a standard API for web browsers to access it, and a standard Web API for saying "user age >= N" like with an HTTP header.

Tech savvy kids will still bypass it but compared to the 0.01% coverage of "are you 18" popups it would be a massive improvement at zero privacy cost so long as it's optional / without external enforcement of accuracy.