The Field Is Optional. The Death Threats Were Not.

Fraudulent takeout orders. Mormon missionaries at the door. A Social Security number posted on an imageboard.

Dylan M. Taylor is a Senior DevOps Engineer in North Carolina. He has contributed to Arch Linux, NixOS, and dozens of open source projects over the years. In early March 2026, he submitted pull request #40954 to systemd, adding a single optional field called birthDate to the JSON user record schema.

The field stores a self-reported date. It defaults to unset. You can enter January 1, 1900. Nobody verifies it. No government ID. No facial recognition. No third-party service. Systemd itself, as Lennart Poettering argued in the PR, handles the data while policy enforcement belongs in the application sandbox, not in userdb.

Taylor designed it so Linux distributions would have a privacy-preserving option for complying with age-attestation laws taking effect in California, Colorado, and Brazil. He explicitly stated on his blog: "I do NOT agree with these laws in any way. I think they are poorly written and overreaching."

The mob attacked him anyway.