Per the very first reply on their thread discussing it in their forums, which I linked directly to for the post title:
We’ll NEVER require any verification or identification from the user.
However, what’s gonna happen should the attempts to age-gate the XDG portal screw over alt-init distros like Artix too? My guess is maybe they start blocking regions which force age gating like Arch Linux 32 is doing.
Yet. it’s a foot-on-the-door to demand more stuff, and some distros have already shown they are going to merrily open up their arses and ours.
This is something being created in response to laws being passed by politicians, it’s not a secret plot by systemd and distro maintainers to… whatever it is that you’re implying.
This is about as scary as the realName, emailAddress or location fields. They’re completely optional and not validated in any way. You can call yourself Linus Torvalds set your e-mail address to gaben@valve.com and your location to Mars… nothing about the system is going to check or care if you’re lying. Similarly, now you can set your birthdate to April 20th 69BC if you’d like. It doesn’t mean anything.
e: I lied, it has to be ISO 8601 compliant so anybody born before 1900 is ineligible for Linux, smh