this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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I draw the line at when a third party internet-connected service is doing validation of ID. Let’s be honest though, I strongly believe such a thing isn’t possible on a FOSS operating system environment unless they could control what was bootable on the device at a firmware level, enforce signatures to ensure that you couldn’t boot something unrestricted, remove the ability to be root, and block LD_PRELOAD so signals couldn’t be faked. There’s probably more ways to circumvent that.

What I’m trying to say is real ID verification on Linux would be awfully hard to implement, and I guarantee you, nobody would put up with it. They’d fork to a version that doesn’t have it immediately as a protest. Right now, we’re considering implementing something akin to the date pickers that were ubiquitous when signing up for internet services in the early 2000s where it’s just an honor system.

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[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 0 points 4 hours ago

The whole point of the 'Real Name' and 'Location' fields was so that people could physically locate you.

They've been part of Linux since the 1960s without any horrible outcomes. birthDate is even less identifying than 'Real Name' and even less dangerous than 'Location'.

Not that it matters because they are all optional fields that nobody uses unless they want to.