In March of 2026, systemd, the init system that boots most modern Linux distributions, merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user database.

The stated purpose was compliance with California’s AB-1043, Colorado’s SB26-051, and Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, a wave of age verification laws requiring operating systems to collect birth dates from users at account setup, then feed that data to app stores via a real-time API…

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal…

Nobody paid him to do this. He’s a cloud engineer who read the law and decided someone needed to implement it…

The pattern HN picked up immediately… That’s the true believer pattern… Every objection the community raised went nowhere: that this enables surveillance infrastructure, that lying is trivially easy, that the laws themselves are unconstitutional overreach…

The open source community has always relied on the assumption that contributors act in good faith toward user freedom…

The community needs to recognize the pattern before the PR opens, not after.

Source: The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux