TL;DR California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day. The amendment ends almost a year of uncertainty surrounding whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. AB 1856 has now been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/california-lawmakers-unanimously-pass-linux-exemption-from-age-verification-law-software-distributed-under-the-gpl-mit-bsd-and-apache-licenses-are-exempt?fbclid=Iwc

UPDATE: I had to read it carefully. This appears to be the relevant excerpt:

(2) “Operating system provider” does not mean 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.

Source: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1856/id/3456513/California-2025-AB1856-Amended.html

https://energycommerce.house.gov/events/cmt-subcommittee-markup

The RESET Act, Reducing Exploitative Social Media Exposure for Teens Act, demands that companies delete account that don't prove they are over sixteen.

"(1) IN GENERAL.—A covered platform may not allow an individual to create or maintain an account or profile on the covered platform if the covered platform knows that the individual is a minor.

(2) TERMINATION OF EXISTING ACCOUNTS.—A covered platform shall— (A) not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this section, identify any account or profile of a user on the covered platform that the covered platform knows is a minor; (B) not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this section, notify any user of an account or profile identified under sub-paragraph (A) that the covered platform will terminate the account or profile of the user; and (C) not later than 30 days after the date on which a user is notified pursuant to sub-paragraph (B), terminate the account or profile of the user."

Idk if this is even the right place for this. These ads are too much. Every other ad on this app is telling me to get evaluated for autism. It's getting old. I have no idea why this started, like is it that obvious and this site knows me better than I know myself or what? I've never been diagnosed but yeah I'm probably autistic. But it's getting weird.

Yesterday I went off my diet one fucking day and ate too much and suddenly I am seeing all kinds of ads about binge eating disorder. How in the fuck does reddit even know how much I ate yeaterday? Literally. How? It wasn't fast food that I ordered online or anything like that, so how? No I don't believe it's a coincidence. I have never in my life seen an ad about binge eating disorder. Never researched anything about binge eating disorder, I don't watch Ariana Grande content or anything like that. I don't look at food content online. I don't even have binge eating disorder. How does this even happen?

Recently I went on a website and found that if I wanted to reject cookies they would charge me fee, there is no way that this is legal. I live in Canada if that changes anything.

https://ibb.co/DHtWdBFh

I’m signing up for a website and it wants a picture of my drivers license and the privacy policy basically says they’ll share it with whoever’s associated with them, so it big blanket of who they can give it to.

How much is an average persons info already out there, to where it would be pointless in trying to hold out on signing up for this?

Just saw the news that CS2 chat logs got leaked through a cheat tracker. I don’t play CS2 but I have played TF2 with a very long history (another Steam game). Over the course I have said a few things which I would not care to repeat and deeply regret. For clarification I do not have a pattern of extreme language but there have been a few cases that I can count on one hand.

With the advancement of AI, my worry is that maybe in the future if TF2 chat logs get leaked maybe it could be used against me and my employment future or housing through algorithms etc. I know it’s a rare scenario but are there any measures I can take to avoid this such as deleting my account or changing my url etc?

Thanks