Yea they have to ask for your age bracket. That's not the same as an ID.
I agree, the definition of an application is much too broad. And should be revised. But the difficulty is how do you restrict it without also creating a multitude of loopholes for businesses to exploit. At the very least we should restrict it to applications whose primary purpose is to interact with the internet.
And before you say it, yes I am aware that that still leaves many apps like curl, wget, ssh being covered. But it could be a start.
Or maybe just restrict it to social media applications. I am not a lawyer, I definitely don't have a great grasp of how to create the type of language that is appropriate for laws.
I fully agree, the definition of application is too broad and should be revised. But how do we revise it without also introducing loopholes that companies can exploit.
All the law requires developers to do is receive the signal and treat that as the primary indicator of the user's age and to comply with applicable laws (ie. things you should have been doing already anyways).
For applications like ls (which let me be clear that I do not believe this app should be covered by this law) it could be as easy as requesting the signal from the OS, deciding that the user's age bracket does not matter for your execution, and just performing as usual.
They should really limit the definition of application to just social media apps. (which would likely include things like irc apps).