userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records by dylanmtaylor · Pull Request #40954 · systemd/systemd
github.com
Stores the user's birth date for age verification, as required by recent laws in California (AB-1043), Colorado (SB26-051), Brazil (Lei 15.211/2025), etc. The xdg-desktop-portal project is addi...

Fork time? Maybe all the anti-systemd zealots were right all along…

Edit: To address whether it is likely that this change will affect users: Gnome is planning a stronger dependence on userdb, the part of systemd where this change is being implemented. https://blogs.gnome.org/adrianvovk/2025/06/10/gnome-systemd-dependencies/

Final Edit: The PR has been merged into main.

  • mazzilius_marsti@lemmy.world
    5·
    17 hours ago

    I’m a noob when it comes to deep linux stuff.

    So how does this affect end users and are we at risk of leaking personal info? It looks to me they are adding a birthDate field along with other meta data. Will these metadata be sent to whatever local authorities or whatever data hoarder on the web (like Google) without user consent?

    I meant what stops me from listing false info like: Name: Biggus Dickus DOB: 06/09/1969 Nationality: Spartan …etc. ?

    I usually use systemd for stuff like hibernate/suspend, e.g.

    systemd suspend

    and if on i3wm, I edit configs for sleep and lid close in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf

    Are these affected too?.

    • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      7·
      11 hours ago

      The other user data is already stored in the userdb versions that nearly everyone who uses a systemd distro already has. You can check what data is being stored with userdbctl. On my system that looks like this:

      userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)
{
        "userName" : "sky",
        "uid" : 1000,
        "gid" : 100,
        "homeDirectory" : "/users/sky/home"
        "shell" : "/run/current-system/sw/bin/fish"
}

      Honestly this PR is a bit of a nothingburger. I’m not aware of any distro really using userdb to store data beyond what you’d store in /etc/passwd (maybe Ubuntu does?). The main value of userdb seems to be as a frontend so other programs don’t need dedicated code to handle /etc/passwd, LDAP, etc. Notably GNOME recently eliminated their dedicated code in favor of just using userdb.

      And Userdb doesn’t really handle data validation at all. It enforces that you input a valid date after 1900, but that’s kinda it. I guess you need root/sudo privileges to change the birthdate but that’s not much of a hurdle for most Linux users.

      Really this entire PR boils down to:

      ALTER TABLE users ADD birthdate date;
      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 hours ago

        And this is how I find out that systemd lets a process running as a user get the crypted password of the user:

        "privileged" : {
                "hashedPassword" : [
                        "$6$AY98/.dwdtU20LBM$L9fFhaH.E2xA6waYBVmHl/wS4HFSPn5v/JaIlrSW6wLOfKkV6H1Boqggj/109WO/uHXF1J/NkyXsK1BaCRKwx/"
                ]
        },

        I mean, why the hell…