I've read this and it bamboozles me (IANAL) and I don't see a size threshold, nor a floor, as in "free". IMNSHO, overreaching, without limits.
And when kids are writing vibe apps, will they be nailed for $2500+?
It doesn't seem nearly as oppressive as you fear. It age-gates online services. The only impact to software is indirect: "covered manufacturers" of devices must provide a mechanism during setup to collect the user's age. This is to be used to send a signal about age to online services.
By my reading, that's about it. Am I missing something?
Surely that information could never leak out, or be used for other purposes.
Tell me how this exempts linux systems, the distro authors, and every app developer for said operating systems.
So, an IT director might have to certify that all sysadmins and developers are over 18?
And what if a child has access to email or other service run on that system. Tomorrow, I'll give some thought to wi-fi and other routers.
I see nothing excepted.
YMMV
There's nothing to exempt. If the OS is preinstalled on a device, this will require the device to ask the user's age during initialization. That's all.
> So, an IT director might have to certify that all sysadmins and developers are over 18?
I see nothing in the law that even hints at this.
> And what if a child has access to email or other service run on that system. Tomorrow, I'll give some thought to wi-fi and other routers.
I also see nothing in the law that addresses this.
From what I understand, CA wants some kind of age field at the operating system/browser level that can be set once by a parent and trusted to work on every website out there - instead of the current system of needing to manually set an age on every individual website.