These could include government IDs, face or voice recognition, or so-called "age inference", which analyses online behaviour and interactions to estimate a person's age.
Surely this won't be used by the government to monitor internet usage!
Australia already has metadata tracking. This law is poorly implemented by a bunch of old fools who don't understand how the internet works. All it will achieve is training a generation to subvert the government's nonsense better.
Not really.
This law draws a line in the sand indicating societal expectations.
It empowers parents to set and maintain appropriate boundaries without being influenced by what other parents allow their kids to do. Its a lot easier to maintain a "no social media" rule if other parents are doing the same.
Also I dont really have any faith at all in the young teenagers of today being able to circumvent anything. Sure. A few will... but certainly not most or even a significant portion.
If you cant install it from the app store then its out of reach.
That's not how the law works and it doesn't empower parents to do anything. It just makes social media sites check for age and deny under 16s. It only applies to sites hosted by companies or people with a presence in Australia, and it refers to methods of age verification that don't exist yet even though the law is now in force.
WDYM that's not how the law works? All laws are a statement of societal expectations.
it doesn’t empower parents to do anything
Of course it does. Obviously, it's much easier to tell your kids they're not allowed to use facebook if most of their friends aren't using facebook.
It only applies to sites hosted by companies or people with a presence in Australia
So you mean, the vast majority of platforms on which children congregate?
It sounds like you haven't actually read it.
This law is a series of requirements on social media site operators and the definition of the fines they will receive if they don't comply. It doesn however define the actual methods those operators must use, only who will define them (they are still yet to be defined). They scale of what constitutes a social media site is wild.
Empowering parents would be helping them understand methods for combating toxic social media use or supporting them in improving their internet and cyber safety literacy. Implementing a law and providing limited narrative on its function through traditional mainstream media is not empowering parents. Do you think many parents understand their liability for the Minecraft server their kids will inevitably set up from what's been reported so far?
Circumventing this law is trivial. You wildly underestimate the ability for teenagers to get away with doing things they want.
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.
And porn can still be purchased or shared on bootleg DVDs.
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.
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.
Technically they already do, if you you're the account holder
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.
One is purchasing a month to month phone plan with cash for example
They could require you to show an ID to purchase a phone.
Or finding open wifi networks
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
Thank god. They should ban it for those over 16 too
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age.
Snapchat has said users can use bank accounts, photo ID or selfies for verification.
In other words, Australia just enforced "internet by passort", right? Very useful if the goal is build a surveillance state. Besides the fact that is required from platforms to store these IDs and in case of any data breach hakers will get not only email addresses, but emails + id.
Also looks as a very cool feature for platforms themselves: match of users data between different systems becomes much easier: no more expensive and complex digital fingerprinting, just direct match by ID.
There's evidently a concerted international effort to end anonymity and privacy on the internet, disguised as protecting children. It would be worrying at any time, but it's particularly alarming when authoritarian fascism is also on the rise pretty much everywhere. ID verification (sold as age verification) is a major step towards making it impossible for political dissidents and victimized groups to organize resistance or read uncensored information without being put on a list, to find, support and defend each other, or to travel freely.
This is the thing I'm most afraid of. It's why I've been moving everything to self hosting and de-googling.
I think it may be time for the public to create their own P2P mesh networks that are "disconnected" from the main internet.
Also as a self-hoster I wonder how this would effect smaller individuals that run their own blogs and websites. How would a small random person be forced to put up a ID verification on their website that they might be running on a small POS laptop?
If ID verification is required but not practical for small independent websites, these laws effectively make it impossible to run an independent website. So only big corporations can serve content on the internet.
Corporate Internet sucks anyway. I'm fine with ending anonymity in it.
Why not provide parents with routers instead that have easy to set parental controls?
This feels very similar to someone coming into my home and telling me how to raise my own kids.
The government could also create its own curated list of websites that are considered "kid friendly" at different age gaps and have it made available within a routers parental control menu to be turned on/for deviced marked as being used by ones child on your home network.
Also at the same time it's not about protecting children, it's about controlling the general population with the guise of protecting the children. It's like getting searched when walking in and walking out of a store.
Imo we need locked down "child" devices. Any other solution is crazy police state shit.
I'm gonna make a prediction before reading the article: either there isn't an actual plan for how to do this, or it's actually a plan to surveil adults
Woah hey look I was right
The government says firms must take "reasonable steps" to keep kids off their platforms, and should use multiple age assurance technologies.
These could include government IDs, face or voice recognition, or so-called "age inference", which analyses online behaviour and interactions to estimate a person's age.
Platforms cannot rely on users self-certifying or parents vouching for their children.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, began closing teen accounts from 4 December. It said anyone mistakenly kicked off could use government ID or provide a video selfie to prove their age.
Snapchat has said users can use bank accounts, photo ID or selfies for verification.
Wild seeing so many nations amassing the tools of surveillance fascism, and repression to little backlash because the leaders aren't as outright fascist as some other countries. This will end poorly.
I swear every headline about Australia is something like:
"Australia bans the only things you found fun growing up"
Guns? That’s the other thing we’re famous for.
Video game censorship comes to mind, can't say guns are an American's favorite thing growing up...
There’s not really any video game ban legislated in Australia.
You might be thinking of an our stupid classification board who occasionally make weird, inconsistent decisions resulting games being prohibited for sale to certain markets or altogether.
For a long time this was because there was no R 18+ classification, forcing some games to be refused classification. This has been addressed, but the Australian Classification Board aren’t always applying it correctly so there’s reform needed of the ACB to fix this outright (it seems to be gradually improving maybe?)
Interesting, maybe I'm remembering older info then. I seem to remember there being some games that had an "Australian" version that removed a lot of the gore/violence.
Yeah there’s been censored versions released to get around ACB being dickheads. It’s silly.
Hotline Miami 2.
Is a great example of what I’m talking about. This can be given an R18+ rating, ACB appear to be dragging feet on classification because they’re idiot bureaucrats who think it’s their job to apply their own moral standards.
I'm of two minds on this. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it's scary what happens.
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