Why does birthdate trigger y'all so much, but physical location (literally the field right before it, that you can see in the diff context) doesn't? Shouldn't we be protesting even harder against systemd tracking our physical location?
Didn't physical location exist back when mainframes were a thing? Unix users would use it to find others IRL. Usually you wouldn't mind other users of the mainframe being able to visit you, that was the purpose of the field. But birth date? There are not really any genuine uses for that being at the system level. It's being used exclusively to add restrictions and lock things down, and that's exactly the kind of thing Free Software is not-for.
There’s no legislation coercing that field. systemd is doing what GECOS and chfn and .plan allow, but OS vendors are free to remove GECOS, chfn or .plan support.
