Generic

Removing Age Reporting from Any Distro

This guide covers the distribution-agnostic approach to removing age reporting infrastructure. It targets the components defined in the freedesktop D-Bus proposal, which is the most likely implementation path regardless of which distro ships first.

Speculative commands

These are speculative commands based on the current D-Bus proposal. Actual paths, service names, and package names will be confirmed when implementations ship. Do not run these commands on a system that doesn't have an age reporting implementation installed — they won't do anything useful.

D-Bus Service Removal

If an age reporting implementation uses the proposed org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1 bus name, these are the steps to find and remove it. 

# Find the service on the system bus
busctl list | grep -i age

# Stop the service
sudo systemctl stop age-verification.service

# Mask the systemd unit (prevents restart)
sudo systemctl mask age-verification.service

# Remove the D-Bus service file
sudo rm /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1.service

# Remove the D-Bus policy
sudo rm /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1.conf

Masking the unit creates a symlink to /dev/null, which prevents the service from being started by any means — including socket activation and dependency resolution. Removing the D-Bus service file and policy prevents bus activation.

Data Removal

Age data may be stored in a dedicated directory or embedded in existing account data. Check both locations. 

# Remove standalone age data (location will vary)
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/age-verification/

# Check AccountsService for age fields
grep -r "Age\|DateOfBirth" /var/lib/AccountsService/users/

If the grep finds age-related fields in AccountsService user files, you can edit those files directly to remove the offending lines. AccountsService user files are plain-text INI-format files in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/, one per user.

Prevention

After removal, prevent the infrastructure from returning. The method depends on your package manager:

apt (Debian, Ubuntu)

echo "age-verification-package hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections

dnf (Fedora)

sudo dnf versionlock add age-verification-package

pacman (Arch)

# In /etc/pacman.conf:
IgnorePkg = age-verification-package

Keep Apps Working After Removal

If applications begin querying org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1, removing the service without a replacement will cause D-Bus errors. The short-circuit section documents a stub daemon that registers the same bus name and returns "unknown" (bracket 0) for all queries. Apps get a valid response. No age data is collected or stored.

D-Bus Stub Daemon Short-Circuit Overview