Of course that is not parental controls. That's 3rd party controls. Parental controls means you create a child account for children and when a site is detected as being adult ideally using RTA headers [1] then a password prompt asks for the parents approval. That is parental controls.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-The-Chi...
Indeed, that's a reasonable approach. Just to clarify that we're agreeing, the comment I was replying to was strongly defending California and Illinois' laws that require the OS record an age field for the primary user of the device, which while currently self-declared is at least an obvious path for future, more invasive legislation.
The problem with a self declared approach is that puts a signalling mechanism in place. Once in place the laws can easily scope creep year over year to add more information or require putting in ID information or some future nation-wide digital ID and Trump coin digital wallet which could easily be the plan all along. All they need is the API that will interface with websites using some agreed upon standard and then it can easily be extended line by line. Give them an inch, they will take a mile.
With proper parental controls there is no signalling.
Ensure system does not have this information:
loginctl show-user $USER 2>/dev/null
userdbctl user $USER --json=pretty 2>/dev/null | grep -i birth
homectl inspect $USER | grep -i birth
sudo homectl update $USER --birthday=""
If in the future the browser gets passive / aggressive updates if they mimic Microsoft and refuses to run if there is no age set or if they can not call systemd commands or libraries then script a random age or age range on each login so that it is not used for tracking. pseudo super-cookie
They can do that with or without an existing law.
Without signaling nothing would happen. There's always signaling.