The law does not exempt server OS and non-interactive software or software that doesn’t need age verification for any reason (like a calculator or offline text editor). It’s a nightmare for those reasons alone.

2027 is way too soon for developers to need to implement this because operating systems will first have to decide on the shape of the “signal”, and there will necessarily be knee-jerk “fuck you” reactions. Then verification needs to be implemented in hundreds of different programming languages and paradigms. Then developers can start to implement. I guess all my little toy applications that are publicly available on GitHub are now out of compliance, fuck me though.

See my other comment on this post for a longer breakdown of why I believe this is utterly stupid.

As a politically engaged California voter, I didn’t hear a peep about this. My state assembly and senate reps will be hearing from me.

Yes, you are missing things.

How does this work with virtual machines that have service account “users” that I deploy?

The definition of application is so broad that it seems to cover any kind of software, even if it does not actually interact with a user, but merely provides system functionality (like your network device discovery daemon e.g. bonjour/avahi, or device drivers) just because you can download it.

Any software you can retrieve from the Internet and “launch” is required to collect user age data. Like your graphics card settings app, your PDF reader, a calculator. I can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do with it though, so it’s a lot of work for no reason.

WTF is “launch” supposed to mean? Install? Open?

I guess every little toy app I put on GitHub is now going to be subject to this? If I fork an old application that doesn’t provide the interface, am I now responsible for doing so even if I only use it on my own devices?

What about software developer by people that aren’t in California and don’t want to be bothered? Can I now not use their calculator or spreadsheet or text editor applications because they don’t collect age verification signals?

2027 is way too soon because there’s no way all the Operating Systems have decided on the shapes of their signals, so I can’t even start figuring out how to implement in any of the 5 programming languages I have used to develop apps.