Illinois Joins "Age Verification for Operating Systems" Bandwagon

0:00Illinois has joined the ranks of the Let's do age verification on all operating systems bandwagon. It's of course they have because of course they have Colorado has already passed the Let's do age verification on your operating system at the OS level law that that actually takes effect this next January Colorado and New York also have similar laws. New York's is really, really gnarly, New York's applies to any internet enabled device. So if you have an internet connected crock pot in theory, it has to do age verification. And some of these laws like the California and Colorado law, they leave things kind of nebulous. They say that you have to declare what your birth date is and doing it incorrectly could carry a penalty. You have to declare what your birth date is and maybe application developers will need

1:01to do some additional verification where the New York law diverges and gets really crazy is they make it clear that it is up to the operating system developer to do additional age verification for all of the users. It gets pretty intense. And then the Illinois law, the new Illinois law is sort of a of a combination of multiple laws. It's got bits and pieces of the California and Colorado laws, basically meaning that a user has to say, here's my birth date, I swear on the holy Bible that this is my birth date, right? They have to do that every time a new user account is created. But in addition to that, the Illinois law also adds in online services, age verification requirements, so various social media sites and whatnot would have to collect age verification information on top of everything else.

2:01So the Illinois law is a little bit more broad than the California or Colorado laws. It kind of is California plus Texas plus Louisiana plus a few other states. All rolled into one. So it's pretty, it's not great. It's not great. It was proposed or it's being sponsored by, let's see, Senator Laura Elman, a Democrat from the state of Illinois. And she's the lone sponsor of it at this point in time. It's entitled the Children's Social Media Safety Act. But what caught my eye about it is that it requires operating system level age verification. And to me, that's just, that's just wild. I get, I want to stop for a second and kind of back up here a little bit because there's a lot of laws going on. There truly are many different approaches to the age verification goal issue, whatever

3:05you want to call it. And some of those laws are specifically focusing on online services. And there's a unique set of concerns when you're doing age and ID verification for online services, a lot of privacy and security related concerns with that. But that's one set of issues, right? Like if you say, let's create a law that says a person who wants to access an adult only website or buy age restricted material, like let's say alcohol, right? On a website, they have to provide age verification in some way. Okay, well, we can have an argument about whether or not that makes any sense at all. We can have an argument about about what are the pros and cons of this? And does this actually do more harm than good? I think it probably does. But we can have that argument. But then these new laws, which are saying, we're not even worried about these websites.

4:05We're not worried about online services. We're going to do age verification on your local operating system. That starts to get a little bit weird to me, right? Because at that point, we're not talking about a scenario where you can avoid doing the age and ID verification, right? So if we say, if there's a law that passes in, let's say Texas that says in order to go to an adult website, you have to provide age verification in some way. Okay, well, that can be avoided by not going to an adult website. Just what I'm saying, whereas once you get the age verification baked into the operating system itself, no man, woman or child can avoid doing it, right? In theory, in theory, the age verification for adult restricted materials through specific websites would never necessarily impact a kid.

5:08It would never necessarily impact anyone who doesn't want to partake of those services. But the operating system level will now we're making a catalog of kids in operating systems and we're requiring people to provide personally identifiable information just to use their local operating system, even if they have no intention whatsoever of going to age restricted websites to buy alcohol or adult entertainment material or whatever on the internet. If they have no intention of ever doing that, it doesn't matter. They're still providing age verification at the OS level. And to me, that is a whole new level of onerous, of horrible. I'm generally not a huge fan of age verification at all because of the privacy concerns with it. I think that there's reasonable debates to be had about age verification and certain types

6:13of online services. Sure, we can have those debates. I'm not a big fan of those, the age verification there because it's always going to go wrong. Every online service is going to get hacked. That's just all there is to it. But at the operating system level, awful, just plain awful. And the fact that there's so many laws requiring that, just popping out of just everywhere, coming at you from every angle is incredibly concerning to me. So here's the rundown, excuse me, here's the rundown of the laws we've got right now that I'm currently tracking. The first one that's going to take effect is the Brazilian law, which was signed into law last year and takes full effect on March 17 of this month. So eight days from now, that law means that every operating system manufacturer, developer, supplier, publisher, must include age verification measures for all users on every operating system they ship to the nation of Brazil.

7:20If they fail to do that by March 17, Brazil is reserving the right to find that operating system developer upwards of, I think it's nine and a half million dollars US per violation. Per violation means per user. So if a bunch of has one user in all of Brazil, Brazil could find canonicals creator a bunch of for nine and a half million US dollars. If they've got a thousand or a hundred thousand users in the nation of Brazil, well, do the math there. It gets to be a big number. There's a lot of zeros on that. It's nine five and then just zeros from here to the horizon. These are, these are finds that are potentially crippling, not just for the big companies, but for the small mom and pop shops as well. Now in theory, this is really only going to

8:20in a big way apply to the companies and developers that have a presence in the nation of Brazil. However, that includes Red Hat, Suza, canonical and so many other open source companies that have a have an actual physical and legal presence in the state of Brazil, either offices, employees working remotely, etc. And so this is going to have a really big impact in what's really fascinating to me about this law is it seems to have flown under the radar. I've reached out to several people at multiple companies and until I brought this law up to them, none of them knew about it at all. So I don't know what their lawyers are doing, but they need to get on it. The next law that's coming into effect is California, AB 1043, which takes effect on January 1st of this coming year. It's not quite as intense as the Brazil law, but it's also completely destructive. I believe it's

9:24$7,500 per per violation. So per user that does not get the age attestation functionality and whatnot in their operating systems by January 1st of this coming year. Now this is the entire state of California. And again, if there are, let's say, operating system companies that don't exist in the United States and don't do any business in the state of California, they don't have another thing to worry about. But if they've got a presence in the state of California, they've got they've got potential issues here. Now these laws are, these laws are horrible. These laws are fightable, but you have to actually fight them in order to fight them. Colorado has a similar law to California's law. In fact, it's nearly identical. It passed the Senate in the state of Colorado already and has gone on to the House. There is every indication that it will pass.

10:26Colorado is controlled top to bottom by the Democratic Party. And this particular law was introduced by the Democrats. Now that's not to say that there's no Republicans in the United States voting for these laws. They're absolutely are. In fact, in California, California, the law was proposed by a Democrat. The California State Senate House and and governorship are all controlled by the Democrats. But lots of, lots of Republicans voted for the law as well. It's really got bipartisan support as awful as that is. Colorado is the same way. Less percentage wise Republicans vote for the law in both voted for the law in both California and Colorado than the Democrats did, but it still aren't a way enough for it to pass. So the Colorado law is going to happen. New York, it's in Senate committee. The New York law,

11:28I mentioned this before, is really horrific. It doesn't just require that you declare what your age is and the operating system provider has to provide an API for figuring out a person's age bracket for app developers and all sorts of things. The New York law actually requires that the operating system developer do, how did they term it? It was a commercially viable age verification procedures. And so beyond just declaring yes, I am this age, they have to actually verify that information for the state of New York. That's currently in the Senate committee. Again, it seems like it has pretty wide support. There's good odds that one will pass in the state of New York. Illinois law, the law in Illinois is like a combination of the California law mixed with some other aspects of like some Texas laws and whatnot, all combined together. But that one also looks like it could stand a pretty good chance of making it out of committee and actually passing.

12:32At that point, we then have four laws or four states in the United States plus Brazil that are requiring age verification at some level for all users of all operating systems. Regardless of whether or not they ever want to use any age restricted applications or websites or whatever, what have you. It's pretty horrific. Now, I also want to point out the Singapore law because this is somewhat related. So there's a lot of age restriction and age verification laws going on right now. Like I was mentioning earlier, there's laws related to websites and social media and the like. There's also a number of laws related to app stores. And these aren't necessarily operating system user account age verification, but age verification in order to utilize an app store. So Singapore has what they call the code of practice for online safety for app distribution

13:35services law, which requires age verification features for specific app stores. And this this law is kind of strange in that it's been around for a while. But as only just now at the end of this month, March 31st, just a few weeks from now, taking a heart effect, meaning that companies that don't follow through with this will face fines and whatnot in Singapore. Now, what's strange is these app store requirements that the app store does age verification provide an age verification API and the like only applies to Apple, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and Samsung. That's it. Right. So like a steam OS or Epic or any other various app stores does not apply because it only applies to the app stores that are specifically named in the law. And I think the idea behind that is uh, Singapore said, Hey, what are the five biggest app stores that we can think of?

14:42That's what they went with. So only app stores that are specifically listed by the Singapore age verification law are are going to be required to do this sort of thing. Now it's what's interesting about that is as of this last Friday, Apple was the only app store in compliance with the Singapore age verification law. That's not a joke. So so this again, this has been going on for a while now. This particular age verification law, gosh, I don't have it right in front of me here, but it's been around for over a year, I think going on two years now. And as of February 24th, Apple had rolled out new APIs and whatnot to allow really forced developers to do age verification within their applications. Right. So Apple does the age verification themselves and then developers use this API to query the Apple app store to see if

15:45a user what age bracket a user is in and if they're allowed to use their app or access certain online features, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But but as of this last weekend, Microsoft, Google, Huawei and Samsung have not met the requirements for the Singapore law. All of these companies have have business presence in Singapore. So now will they make it in time like three weeks left in order to provide these age verification features and APIs and whatnot. Otherwise, they're going to be in violation of the Singapore laws. And the question is, is what Singapore going to do about that? Right. Like what's what Singapore going to do in order if Microsoft or Huawei or Samsung don't don't meet the the requirements under their law. I don't know the answer to that. I'm going to be watching to see if Singapore follows through to Singapore have any teeth on

16:48this one. What are they going to do? What are they going to do? Microsoft doesn't doesn't follow through. Now, Google and Microsoft and all of them have some level of this functionality already working. They're just not in total compliance. The only one who believes they're in total compliance with the Singapore law is is Apple. But again, and I think this is this is really critical to point out at least in those cases as as not a good idea as I think that that is, I think it's a bad idea. At least it's not at the core operating system level. Right. To me, that's that is just far, far past a hard line that you have to draw when you have even if we have an entirely offline operating system, it still has to provide age verification of some form. At certain levels, it's more age declaration than age verification. But even the New York one, if I have

17:51any operating system that just happens to has a TCP stack on it, it has to do age verification. And to me, that that is just way beyond that's that's that's to the point where I just I oh, my oh, my word, oh, my word. And the horrible thing to me is that we're going to see more of these laws. I bet you anything. It's Monday, March 9th as I'm recording this. I would be willing to bet good money that will have at least one more of these laws within the next week or two. I mean, I mean, we're right. I mean, we've we've really just scratched the surface of this. And there's a whole lot of states and a whole lot of lawmakers that I guarantee you are going to be tripping over themselves to be the ones that that sponsor these sorts of bills. And I think a lot of you were thinking to yourselves, what's behind this? It feels like they're all kind of happening at once. Is are there common donors that are that are encouraging this? Are

18:54there political action committees that are encouraging this? And there's investigation being done. Everything's being looked into. And as we connect any various dots, I will talk to you about them here. Thank you to the Lunduke Journal subscribers for allowing this sort of coverage to be possible. What's crazy is if it weren't for the Lunduke Journal subscribers, this story would still be languishing mostly under cover of darkness. It's crazy. But until the Lunduke Journal started covering this story, no other major tech news outlet was touching it. Not at all. And it wasn't like it was it wasn't there, right? The California law passed last year. It passed like last November. And the Lunduke Journal didn't cover it until like two weeks ago. And then once the Lunduke Journal covered it, then it's everywhere. And that that only really came to light because all of you were supporting the work of the Lunduke Journal. So go to lunduke.com,

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