The California law is a local flag for age range. Its not a law that requires ID, or tracking, or anything else like that. Given that its set by the user optionally, and from my understanding illegal to use for anything but age verification, I don’t understand how this is that negative for privacy or freedom.
Edit: Also, setting the age accurately is entirely optional. I don’t see how this impacts freedom either.
I and many others I know who grew up with unrestricted internet access (before and after the corporatization of the internet) were exposed to terrible shit. Like, I grew up with unusually tech savvy parents who were able to protect me from the worst of it, but even I have been somewhat traumatized by accessing graphic content I shouldn’t have. I personally know people who grew up with worse parents who grew up browsing shock/gore websites and who were repeatedly groomed and abused by pedophiles.
Honestly, I don’t really get the backlash to this legislation, beyond that its prehaps being applied to devices it shouldn’t be. Its a local, safe option for reducing child access to things they shouldn’t access. While yes, freedom is important, we’re talking about providing the option to limit access to mature content, not preventing them from downloading python or using the internet. There is a justified reason for wanting this, and this seems like the ideal way to do it.
Edit: I’m genuinely confused as to why people are against this. All the argument sound like they’re thinking this is another variety on ID collection or AI tracking. From my understanding, this is an optional flag, set locally by the user, about as decentralized and pro-user-choice as it gets. I’m going to reread the law to make sure Im not missing something.
Edit 2: Reading the law, section 4a seems unpractically vague, but in favour of blocking data collection. From my understanding, that would ban the use of things like user agents, and theme settings in browsers. Notably, the law also specifies fines for both accidental and intentional data sharing. This seems like about as good an option as you can get, for protecting children, while keeping it user-choice driven, decentralized, and anonymous.
Edit 3: Actually, in combination with the CCPA, possibly COPPA, and California Civil Code, wouldn’t this effectively work as a “tracking me is now illegal” switch?
Edit 4: My interpretation of 4A was incorrect, it would not block the access of other system-level flags. It would simply block requesting further personal data from the OS’s developer.
Edit 5: I have changed my opion. This law incentivizes entering accurate information too heavily, and despite always using the term, “age bracket data” doesn’t require any abstraction of stored age. Its also just not good enough as a content-filtering system, since its opaque and doesn’t allow for much filtering of specific topics (IE gore versus porn). I’m still not against such a standard being created, but this is not the way to go about it.
The original dog image, for those wondering:
This is a slippery slope falicy. Just because the option is provided to self-identify age, doesn’t mean that it will be replaced with more complex and direct data collection (which I am against, if it wasn’t clear) later - esspecially considering that if its based on this law, it would be literally impossible. 4a bans the collection of data from your system besides age, and the fact that it is all handled locally and sharing it is prohibited means that it would be impractical to implement anything fancier than a text box to collect data. If anything, this looks like a way to be seen “doing something” without having to change anything for most users. Hell, if California wantted to implement a law for data collection, why would they have implemented the CCPA, why would they have written this law to ban the sharing of data, and why wouldn’t they just write the data collection law instead, given (as you said) there is already significant backing for the idea.