I've seen conflicting claims about systemd adding an age or date-of-birth field to user records, with some people saying it was later removed. What is the current status? Does systemd perform age verification, or does it merely provide optional user information that desktop environments or applications could use?
3 Answers
There has been discussion about adding and removing an optional date-of-birth field, which is probably why the reports are contradictory. In current systemd tooling, a birth-date option is available for user records, such as homectl --birth-date=YYYY-MM-DD. That still only records a value; it does not verify the user’s age.
systemd does not perform age verification. The relevant field is an optional birthDate entry in user records. It is simply data that other software could read; systemd does not verify someone’s identity or confirm that the date is genuine.
The field can provide a place for desktop environments or applications to store and read a date of birth. If another component chose to make decisions based on it, that logic would belong to that component—not to systemd itself—and it would not constitute strong age verification.
And since it’s just a field in the local user data, someone with sufficient access could change it anyway. It shouldn’t be treated as a reliable identity check by itself.