California Assembly Bill No. 1043 has passed. It requires that "operating system providers" provide an interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate birth date, age, or both, of the user for the purpose of providing a "signal" regarding the user's age bracket to applications available in a "covered application store" and require that the developers of applications request said signal when the application is downloaded and launched. The bill will punish noncompliance with a civil penalty of up to $2,500.00 per affected child for each negligent violation or not more than $7,500.00 per affected child for each intentional violation.

This bill (intentionally or not) attacks privacy. This bill does little to actually protect children. This bill unfairly punishes the wrong parties for the alleged crimes of others.

Important considerations:

1. Starting January 1st, 2027, all Californians lose the ability to use a computer without making personal information available to third parties. While it may seem like a simple self-reported age isn't a big deal, it is seemingly a "slippery slope" this bill places us all on. It should be the right of all individuals to protect their personal information from other parties now matter how seemingly "little" it is.
2. Operating system providers (including non-profit and community created ones including Linux, BSD and other open-source based operating systems) will be unfairly punished for not policing the actions of other parties. This bill seemingly aims to protect children from the creators of adult content and entities that collect personal information. Why are the operating system providers being punished for the actions of  these other entities that they have nothing to do with? It has even been speculated that Meta (a company well known for profiting from the collection and distributing of user information) has been pushing this bill in order to escape liability placed on them by already existing laws such as COPPA.)
3. Many people choose to use alternatives to the leading commercial operating systems specifically because of how collecting personal information has seemingly become the norm in the commercial tech space. This bill not only removes this option, but makes it legally mandated that these alternative providers fall in line with the same practices.
4. This bill is hypocritical. It aims to protect children from information collecting third parties and targeted advertising by mandating the collecting and distributing of age ranges of ALL computer users. Now those who intentionally want to target children will have an incredibly effective tool to know exactly who and where on the internet the children are.
5. While this petition is aimed at California AB1043, there are other similar bills from other states (see Colorado Senate Bill 26-051 and New York Senate Bill S8102A). I am a citizen of California so I am creating this petition however I am including these as well as the hope will be that someone at the federal level will see this and recognize that these bills are just as bad (or worse). I would urge concerned citizens of these other states to also contact their representatives and/or make their own petitions. Please feel free to use this one as a template.

I believe there are many people (like myself) who strongly disagree with this bill. I believe this is true regardless of political party affiliation. I am a user and participant in the open-source community and from what I've seen it is largely agreed upon to be a bad one. Many of us didn't even know about it until it was passed. If you disagree with California AB1043 then please sign this petition. I intend to send it to the California State Assembly, Gov. Gavin Newsom and The U.S. Supreme court, though I admittedly have never done anything like this before and will need to research how to do so.