Zed will require age identification for its services | Hacker News Reader

Zed will require age identification for its services

zed.dev

31 pointsmococa22 comments

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Zed already had terms of use that forbid "reverse engineering" (ie looking at the GPL source code).

Gram is a hard fork that removes the TOS, telemetry and AI, and turns Zed into just a text editor.

https://gram.liten.app/posts/first-release/

Definitely worth a look!

This was announced just recently[1]:

   Age requirement. You must be 18 or older to use Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering (the “Service").

[1]: https://zed.dev/blog/terms-update

Where does it say that it will require age verification?

The link you sent basically says "you pinky-promise that you're 18."

Later in the doc it also says "you promise not to send malware."

It's wild that all other comments in this thread (so far) seem to completely miss this nuance. There are lots of services that, in their terms, require users to be adults.

This type of age "identification" is a lot different than age verification, submission of ID, etc.

A lot different in that it dilutes the rule of law rather than being an actual repressive measure, yes. (See also: underage drinking.) Not clear if it’s better: an enforced stupid law can cause actual pushback; a mostly-unenforced one is liable to be enforced arbitrarily against inconvenient companies. (I’m guessing there’s no actual legal requirement for Zed to reject minors, just some sort of legal regime that makes it more trouble than it’s worth, but that only adds to the arbitrariness. The law could even be non-stupid—e.g. they’re trying to sell user data—but with such a fig leaf it might as well be.)

Came to say the same. Neither Ctrl+F by this human nor ChatGPT could find anything at all about age or identity verification. I think the title should be changed.

They sent out an email to clarify that there will be no age verification and that the '18 or older' rule was introduced to avoid that:

> You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service (Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering, including features like account creation/sign in, Zed Free and Zed Pro, and collaboration). See https://zed.dev/terms#21-eligibility. We set the threshold at 18 due to children's data privacy obligations under COPPA, equivalent international frameworks, and an increasing number of state and regional laws that extend protections to anyone under 18. Those regulations require parental consent verification, age-gated data handling, and separate retention policies for minors. Building and maintaining that infrastructure is a real cost for a small team, and getting it wrong carries regulatory risk. Setting the line at 18 lets us maintain a single privacy framework for all account holders without carve-outs.

Misleading title. It's about using their AI service, not the editor.

  Subject to these Terms, Zed will permit Customer to access and use Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering (the “Service”), which enables certain additional features and functionality (including artificial intelligence and collaboration features) in Zed’s open source code editing software (“Software”).

Is this because of the CA Age-verification law (AB 1043)?

https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab...

The headline is tricky: identification != verification

Just wait until the data lobbies get done twisting the words.

Tons of services have terms of service that include a minimum age requirement. That doesn't mean they are _verifying_ those ages. Just that if you are not the minimum age, then you're in breach of the service terms and can be terminated.

YCombinator requires users to be at least 13 years of age. Does that mean HN is going to require age identification? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I installed this one day to try it out and can't remember why I stopped, but apparently now I must hunt it down and destroy every trace of it from my machine, so thanks for the update.

Vim already has age enforcement:

You’ll grow old before you manage to exit!

Zed is gone! Can't let a text buffer humiliate us.

You're a fucking text editor. You edit text. You do not need to know how old I am to edit text.

You don't raise $42M for just a text editor, it was always going to be a vehicle for services and subscriptions and whatever else they can think of.

I guess they don't want to restrict what you can do with it because of some badly worded law somewhere.

The age verification applies to using their account/ai not the editor itself.

I'm not in the habit of giving mice cookies.

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