I think it has to do with the slippery slope. When fields like work phone were added they served actual uses at the time.
They may be functionally identical but this is happening under an increasingly more invasive surveillance system and people have hated systemd eating every linux component since forever. Now that it’s a soft dependency on major desktop environments it just feels like a rug pull that they get to make these changes
It should definitely not be an enabled by default thing that’s for sure. I think when you’re setting up your system, you should get the option to enable birthdate. Then allow restricting access to specific things based on birthdate.
At no point should that control be passed on to anyone beyond the system administrator though. This could be useful for schools and homes with kids that you want to give user accounts to while maintaining a single age filtered list of applications. There’s no reason for it to be included in anything beyond that though.
I think it has to do with the slippery slope. When fields like work phone were added they served actual uses at the time.
They may be functionally identical but this is happening under an increasingly more invasive surveillance system and people have hated systemd eating every linux component since forever. Now that it’s a soft dependency on major desktop environments it just feels like a rug pull that they get to make these changes
It should definitely not be an enabled by default thing that’s for sure. I think when you’re setting up your system, you should get the option to enable birthdate. Then allow restricting access to specific things based on birthdate.
At no point should that control be passed on to anyone beyond the system administrator though. This could be useful for schools and homes with kids that you want to give user accounts to while maintaining a single age filtered list of applications. There’s no reason for it to be included in anything beyond that though.