On Sun, 1 Mar 2026 20:23:05 +0000
David Edmundson <david@davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Another place the functionality could go is xdg-desktop-portal. This
> > one is a bit non-ideal for a couple of reasons; for one, the easiest
> > place to put the call would be in the Account portal, which returns
> > more information than the account's age bracket. This could
> > potentially be considered non-compliant with the law, as it states
> > that the operating system shall "[s]end only the minimum amount of
> > information necessary to comply with this title".
>
> The portal is the best option. The counter-argument doesn't make much
> sense. Operating systems have a trillion other bits of information
> available.
I agree that on a technical level, the counterargument is bad. There's
no good technical reason to not just include age bracket information in
the org.freedesktop.portal.Account.GetUserInformation call. However,
since the bill emphasizes that the OS must not provide more than the
minimum information necessary when it receives what the bill calls a
"signal", and that application developers must not request more
information than necessary, I'm a little bit concerned about it.
I'm hoping maybe someone who knows legal things better can offer some
clarity there (thus why I copied some legal mailing lists from Debian
and Fedora).
I'm not sure how integrating this into the portal would work with
stable-release distributions that don't want to backport a new feature.
If stable-release distributions are willing to make the needed change,
then a portal-only solution would work technically, but if they aren't,
something outside of a portal will probably be necessary at least to
begin with. (Unless there's a way of introducing a new portal without
making any changes to xdg-desktop-portal itself; I haven't looked into
that yet.)
--
Aaron
> If we did want to separate it, the worst case is we make it into a new
> portal, not rule portals out completely.
>
> AccountsService is effectively dead, userdb from systemd is absorbing
> parts. Any changes there would be fragmented.
>
> David
