On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:39:52 -0600
"Jeremy Soller" <jeremy at system76.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> 
> My name is Jeremy Soller, and I am Principal Engineer at System76. We
> released a statement on Age Verification laws last Thursday that you
> can read here:
> 
> https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification
> 
> Our Founder and CEO, Carl Richell, was able to get a meeting with
> Senator Matt Ball today to discuss the Colorado version of the
> California bill, SB26-051. His statements after the meeting are as
> follows:
> 
> https://floss.social/@carlrichell@fosstodon.org/116201429734101067

Wow, this is great to see! Thank you (both you and Carl) for doing
this, and for letting us know!

--
Aaron

> > Today, I met with Colorado Senator Matt Ball, co-author of Colorado
> > OS Age Attestation Bill SB26-051.
> > 
> > Sen. Ball suggested excluding open source software from the bill.
> > This appears to be a real possibility.
> > 
> > Amendments are expected for the CA age attestation bill. It's my
> > hope we can move fast enough to influence excluding open source in
> > the CA bill amendments.
> > 
> > No illusions, it's an uphill battle, but we have an open door to
> > advocate for the open source community.  
> 
> At this time, we are seeing what kinds of changes might be made to
> these laws before they become effective. I would not generally advise
> working on any technical solution when the laws are ambiguous and
> likely to be amended. In the best case, although I believe it is
> unlikely, open-source operating systems would not have any work to do
> at all. In the worst case, different jurisdictions may have
> conflicting laws.
> 
> We and our users greatly value our privacy, and I would hope not to
> see over-eager work on a technical implementation that is heavy
> handed and potentially jurisdiction specific. We at System76 are also
> awaiting the legal opinions of other operating systems, like Ubuntu,
> and those would likely be valuable to all potentially affected
> operating systems.
> 
> Thank you,
> 

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