Assembly Bill No. 1043 was approved by California governor Gavin Newsom in October of last year, and becomes active on January 1, 2027 (via The Lunduke Journal). The bill states, among other factors, that "An operating system provider shall do all of the following:"
"(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
"(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user."
On its face, this seems actually fine. All it's REALLY mandating is that apps have a way to ask if the user is an adult or not. The burden of trust is placed on whoever sets up the OS, I.E. the parent, which is EXACTLY where it should be. No burden is placed on adults setting up usage for themselves. It's not even much of a privacy concern, given that setup doesn't require specifying age, but a general age bracket.
We'll have to see how this ends up getting implemented.
Yeah, it literally says nothing about the method of verification or its reliability
isn't it essentially bait for a harsher law then? any proposed implementation will immediately instigate a thousand bored devs to find ways to bypass, then they can go "look how easy it is to bypass", and justify whatever?
It's not a ridiculous point, but like... our governments need NO excuse to make harsh/strict/nonsense laws. If that's what they wanted, they would have simply done it.