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Australia is banning social media for kids under 16.
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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If you have to use a government ID to access the internet I don't think there'll be a way to subvert it. The tech fixes like face recognition and age inference can probably be spoofed, but IDs seem rock solid unless you steal someone else's ID.
It would be pretty easy to subvert tbh for anyone tech savvy enough.
It's like bypassing windows 11 "cloud account" and using a local account instead. If a person cares enough to ask why someone needs a cloud account to access their own PC.
For ID verification a personal VPS purchased in another country and routing all your home network traffic through that would bypass any ID checks. Also offline copies of websites and downloading content through P2P or usnet would be visible in obscuring your "viewing history".
And porn can still be purchased or shared on bootleg DVDs.
Those solutions don't really work if you need an ID to connect to the internet. Can't access your VPN without internet access, can't get on a P2P or usenet without accessing the internet first.
They'd definitely prefer this, that gives them a physical media that they can track and the police can seize.
Plus it'll give them more excuses to search through people's belongings.
It'd be government ID to access sites hosted in Australia from Australia, but if the internet shows you accessing sites from say Vietnam, or accessing a site not hosted in Australia then what's the government going to do?
They could require an ID to connect to the internet.
Technically they already do, if you you're the account holder
That's not what's been proposed.
In order for social media sites to actually be able to enforce this law it's the only thing that would work. They might feel pressured to make deals with the internet service providers to actually implement this kind of ID check for internet connections.
If they don't, it's only a matter of time until some country does pass such a law.
Sorry, this is baseless supposition.
This ID is already provided with a credit card number TBH and any other info needed to setup a ISP or cellphone plan, but there are ways around that.
One is purchasing a month to month phone plan with cash for example. Or finding open wifi networks and routing all traffic through a personal VPN or a commercial VPN.
They could require you to show an ID to purchase a phone.
Open wifi networks certainly wouldn't provide an ID to connect, which would mean they couldn't be used to access social media.
This is not an unsolvable problem. The question is if Australia is willing to piss everyone off to actually do it.
That's not how the law is written, onus is on social media sites, they haven't banned under 16s from the internet, just from social media.
And the social media sites, in the interest of complying with the law, might make deals with the internet service providers to actually put an ID check on every internet connection. This isn't impossible.
Even if they don't, once legislators realize their law didn't fix the problem they can always pass new legislations.
My point is that this isn't impossible.
Service providers can't verify individual users, its arguably harder for them to do that than it is for social media site operators
They could, we'd just need to hand over even more of our privacy and rights.
Which was always the plan.
People will bypass any barrier they put in place. Hell, that's how I got into IT.
Somebody's IT department put up barriers, which you bypassed to force your way into the job? Is the willfully incorrect way I chose to read it.
"I hacked their system and put myself on payroll, issued myself an ID, and started showing up to work."
Not at all. My stepmom was the head IT person for a school district and I was getting around the blocks she put up on our home internet.
Haha my mum (a primary school teacher at the time) was made the IT person for her school, but that was only because she had a son (me) who liked to fix computer problems for fun