Protection of Minors, was: Re: CoC policy for package contents
Am 01.08.25 um 11:23 schrieb Wouter Verhelst:
> Parental controls don't need a separate section. They need you to not
> give root access to the child.
Certainly, but legislators don't care about technicalities. If they say
gras needs to be red they expect you to make it so. (Best example: legal
interception needs to access E2EE encrypted content but without breaking
E2EE - that's impossible? But we say so, make it work!)
> I could see us perhaps add a field to debian/control to say "in
> jurisdiction X, this package is considered acceptable for people over
> Y years of age",
There's a legal requirement for game distributors to mark games like
that ("parental advisory"), I'm not sure whether that obligation applies
to non-commercial distributors like Debian. But having that meta data
would definitely be good.
> and then add some controls in apt to disallow it to
> install packages marked as such.
Somebody sufficiently motivated could develop something if the meta data
were there.
> But that is a lot of work for something
> that could be solved easily by saying "do not give root passwords to
> your children".
The problem is that some legislators (f.e. Germany starting Dec 2025)
explicitly demand differentiated rights according to the childs age
("you may install a and b but not x,y,z - 5 years older you may also
install x and y but still not z"). So a boolean "root or not root" does
not cover it.
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