If you can feel a very small tinge of existential horror when you read the words “try to”, congratulations, you’re a true *nix devotee.
If legislators get grumpy about this, just gently thwap them with your handy copy of The Unix Haters Handbook and tell them you’re working as hard as you can under the circumstances.
How is it uniquely identifying users if all that OS shares with programs is the age group? (that btw user chooses, can lie without problem)
Fingerprinting. Age, as well as factors like IP address, can be one more data point to individually identify a user with a certain number of accounts.
There’s also potential they changeover from “Enter your DOB” to “Show your driver’s license”, which they can collect much more data from.
That’s all it shares for now (for the California law). Once that’s in, what’s one more step, where the user has to provide proof of age, rather than just presenting one? That requires identification.
If their goal is identification, rather than actually protecting pedophiles (we know this isn’t the case because the Epstein clients are not facing consequences), then it’s easy to see how this leads to that.
The slippery slope is not always fallacious. If it’s a reasonable case, it’s just called a slippery slope argument.
The only real way to prove age is with legit ID.