Complying With Stupid: More On CA AB1403

No way, he wouldn’t do it
No way, a boy’s that stupid
No way, no way
No way, no way

A boy may not be, but legislators sometimes are that stupid.

And everyone involved with CA AB1403 was.

Yesterday in Complying With Stupid: CA AB1403 Is A Bad Law I wrote about a California law from last year that we all seem to have just heard about.

That law is “CA AB1403”; you can read the full text here.

It’s a bad law, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about today.

Today, let’s look at compliance.

First, this is a California law; if you don’t have a presence in California and your software doesn’t depend on anyone who does, then this simply doesn’t apply to you.

If you are here, or your software depends on an operating system or app store that has a presence here, then this law can be applied to you so you should be aware of it.

It requires action from two groups of people:

application developers: required to have their app ask the operating system or the app store from which it was installed what age group the user is in (1798.501.(b))
operating system developers: required to provide a way for the user to state their age and to provide the range in which that age falls to apps that request it (1798.501.(a))

App store developers are not actually required to do anything by this law, despite the fact that they’re one of the possible sources of age data that app developers are required to request it from.

Like I said, it’s a bad law.

It doesn’t actually require the user to state their age or for anyone to verify it if they do.

It doesn’t even require the operating system to force the user to state an age, merely to “provide” a mechanism for them to do so.

This script, simply by being present on the machine, fulfills all that CA AB1403 requires of the operating system.

Here’s the usage statement for the script:

caab1403.sh -h
Usage: ./caab1403.sh [-s age] [-c]
Options:
-s age sets the current user’s age
-c checks the current user’s age bracket

The user can, if they choose to, run that script to state an age; for example, to set the user’s age to 18 they would type:

caab1403.sh -s 18

Any application can run that script to find out what age bracket the current user has set:

caab1403.sh -c

(Note that while the operating system is required to provide a mechanism to do so, CA AB1403 does not require the user to ever set their age; it does require that every application check the age at least once.)