Comment on California law to require operating systems to check your age
taiyang@lemmy.world 2 days ago
At least it’s not requiring ID, and it’s kind of easy to circumvent, but it’s a slippery slope. Also it’s definitely just virtue signalling to the dumbest among us, which is generally a bad thing.
California does this sometimes. One of our more notoriously stupid laws put up cancer warnings on virtually everything with a certain unnamed substance, making it almost impossible to identify things that might be seriously unhealthy. Like you enter a Starbucks and it says something in the Starbucks causes cancer. Like, gee, thanks.
Overprotective, not well thought out, bullshit laws.
Ptsf@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Actually, that one was interestingly both corporate sabotage as well as poor design. The law detailed that all products containing materials known to increase risk of cancer have labeling as such, at first listing only things that the common person would definitely want to know about. Formaldehyde for example. Companies producing products with these chemicals did not like this, and sued to add a laundry list of additional chemicals to the bill under the context that in lab settings they’ve been shown to increase the risk of cancer… And well go figure, they didn’t specify a “significant risk” or anything sane like that in the law, so now pretty much everything that has even a inkling of cancer risk increase gets labeled. Good intent, terrible execution, corporately ruined.
taiyang@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Does make you wonder where the corporate interests lie in the age verification case, but it’s probably the usual suspects in tech and surveillance.