Just what I want in my distro.
After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world’s favorite system management daemon.
Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled “userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records.” It’s a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user’s date of birth:
Stores the user’s birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc.
The contents of the field will be protected from modification except by users with root privileges.
The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.
I always thought that having some kind of “kid-safe” mode for web browsers would be a good idea; there are some people who would use that. People whose age doesn’t necessarily have much to do with it. Having a standard header sent to websites to indicate it and making some rules about what they’re supposed to do when they see it would be feasible enough.
It seems so painfully obvious that having a “date of birth” field in systemd is the wrong way to do things and can only go nowhere or else lead to bad things.