California Age Verification Bill Clears Assembly: Linux Spared, Websites Added to Age-Gating Regime
California Age Verification Bill Clears Assembly: Linux Spared, Websites Added to Age-Gating Regime
Publish Date: 2026-05-30 14:31:00
Source Domain: www.techtimes.com
California’s bid to amend its landmark OS-level age-verification law passed the state Assembly on May 28, 2026, in a nearly unanimous 68-1 vote, sending the bill to the Senate with two simultaneous outcomes that privacy advocates describe as a mixed verdict: open-source Linux distributions would gain a formal exemption from the law’s most burdensome requirements, while all web browsers and websites would be pulled into an expanded age-data collection framework for the first time.
Assembly Bill 1856, introduced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks — the same lawmaker who wrote the original law — amends the Digital Age Assurance Act, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on October 13, 2025. That law requires every operating system provider in California to collect a user’s age or birth date at device setup and transmit a bracketed signal to app developers — classifying users as under 13, 13–15, 16–17, or 18 and older — and is scheduled to take effect January 1, 2027.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposed AB 1043 from the start and has continued to fight AB 1856 in the Senate, described the bill’s current state on May 29, 2026 as “one step forward, two steps back.”
One Clause Redefines “Operating System Provider”
The entire open-source reprieve rests on a single sentence added to AB 1856’s definition of who counts as an “operating system provider.” As revised on May 18, 2026, the bill states that the term does not apply to “a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”
That language places Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, FreeBSD, and virtually every other permissively licensed project outside the law’s compliance requirements. For most Linux distributions, the relief is substantial: the original AB 1043 would have required community-run projects maintained by volunteers — projects that in many cases have no centralized…
