Nice to see the ACS implementing their own dark patterns in making the "Close" text in the top right of their full screen pop-up light-grey and thus difficult to find.
Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.
Australia's been down this road before with the failed 2019 age verification bill and the Online Safety Act. The technical implementation challenges are enormous - from VPN circumvention to privacy risks of ID verification systems.
As an australian citizen i'm all for it. Look at how the internet and social media has destroyed our current youth and their naivety and sense of emotional security. They all act like they're living in soviet russia at this point and have become so hard and jaded.
Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early.
Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion?
A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society.
That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.
Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.
It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.
It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.
This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.
> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
This would be completely and utterly unenforceable in any capacity. Budget smartphones are cheap enough and ubiquitious enough that children don't need your permission or help to get one. Just as I didnt need my parents assistance to have three different mobile phones in high school when as far as they knew, I had zero phones.
I find I am broadly supportive of these laws (The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024), even if this specific regulation is a bit of pearl clutching wowserism.
You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you are a scumbag social media network and you harvest someone's government ID.
You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you don't try to keep young kids away from the toxic cesspool that is your service, filled with bots and boomers raving about climate change and reposting Sky News.
This absolutely stuffs those businesses who prey on their users, at least for the formative years.
And when I think about it like that?
I have no problem with it, nor the fact it's a pain to implement.
The framing that explicit material is bad for kids, while probably true, is besides the point. Lots of things a parent could expose a child to could be bad, but it's always been seen as up to the parent to decide.
What the government should do is ensure that parents have the tools to raise their kids in the way they feel is appropriate. For example, they could require device manufactures implement child-modes or that ISP provide tools for content moderation which would puts parents in control. This instead places the the state in the parental role with it's entire citizenry.
We see this in the UK a lot too. This idea that parents can't be trusted to be good parents and that people can't be trusted with their own freedom so we need the state to look after us seems to be an increasing popular view. I despise it, but for whatever reason that seems to be the trend in the West today – people want the state to take on a parental role in their lives. Perhaps aging demographics has something to do with it.
> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
Why should this be the government's responsibility rather than the parents'?
I feel a lot of Australians think the government is more mollycoddling than it is, it's hard to think of an actual policy in Australia that is outside of the norm of the Western world.
2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff
2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law
2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
2031: Australian ISPs must enforce the login restrictions because some sites are refusing to and there are loopholes
2033: Australian ISPs must provide the government with a list of people who visited this list of specific sites, with dates and times of those visits
2035: you must be logged in to visit these other specific sites, regardless of your age
2036: you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
2037: all visits to all sites must be logged in
2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded
2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age
2040: all visits to all sites will be reported to the government
2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Australian politicians, police, and a good chunk of the population would love this.
Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It's all "beer and barbies on the beach" but that's all actually illegal.
Not quietly, I don't think. Not like Australia is known for freedom and human rights. It's known for expeditionary wars, human rights abuses, jailing whistleblowers and protesters, protecting war criminals, environmental and social destruction, and following the United States like a puppy.
> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".
> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.
> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)
> all visits to all sites will be recorded
Something something Permanent Record.
> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?
Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.
I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.
While I yearn for the more authentic and sincere days of the internet I grew up on, I recognize very quickly by visiting x or facebook how much it isn’t that, and hasn’t been for a long time.
I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.
I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet, and that's why I think this bill is horrible, is full of unintended consequences, and will be worked around by kids who care to do it.
Do they realise that some of us may be using computers that don't even have a camera, and open source software that could in theory upload any image we like?
What an awful sad fall for us all, from such lofty heights of possibility for technology, to a seemingly endless age of both humans being exploited and mechanized by technology and governments doing only the saddest most important useless clutching of pearls fear responses that do nothing to coax the world towards better.
Apologies. I'm already pretty morose over the USA Supreme Court allowing age verification, which although claiming to target porn seems so likely to cudgel any "adult" or sexual material at all.
Until recently the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace has held pretty true. The online world has seen various regulations but mostly it's been taxes and businesses affected, and here we see a turn where humanity is now denied access by their governments, where we are no longer allowed to connect or to share, not without flashing our government verified id. It's such a sad lowering of the world, to such absolutely loser politicians doing such bitter pathetic anti governance for such low reasons. They impinge on the fundamental dignity & respect inherent on mankind here, in these intrusions into how we may think and connect.
The co-leads on drafting the code are rather interesting:
> Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.
Yes. As usual people commenting based on their biases instead of comprehending the text. This is a proposal made by predominantly US companies (a country that actually has mandatory proof of age to access digital services in several states) to a US born eSafety commissioner who previously worked for Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter.
Not really sure what this has to do with the Australian government or Australian people. We can't even properly tax these foreign companies fairly. If we did try to regulate them the US government would step in and play the victim despite a massively one sided balance of trade due to US services being shoved down our throats. We need to aggressively pursue digital sovereignty.
This is very simplistic but at a certain point I feel like parents should just be better parents and take responsibility for what their children do online in their home.
Grand Fascist State Censor Julie Inman Grant strikes again. Another disgraceful loss of privacy for the country defining anglophone technological totalitarianism.
It's interesting how all countries work in tandem implementing these measures. UK, EU, some US States and now Australia all require or will soon require age verification under certain conditions.
It seems like it would make more sense to implement it at the browser level. Let the website return a header (ala RTA) or trigger some JavaScript API o indicate that the browser should block the tab until the user verifies their age.
I wonder if technical complexity of implementing online age checks is about the same as implementing a robust direct democracy system - one where people can vote down bad laws instead of outsourcing those decisions wholesale to politicians they don’t even like?..
As an Australian citizen, this further reinforces my position that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Australia is a laidback country full of easygoing people.
It isn’t. For as long as I can remember it’s been wildly authoritarian, and it seems Australians harbour a fetish for the rules that would make even the average German blush.
Hopefully times have changed (though I don’t think they have), but about 20 years ago, standard fare on the road was to provide essentially no driver training, and then aggressively enforce draconian traffic rules. New drivers can’t drive at night. New drivers have to abide by lower speed limits than other drivers. Police stop traffic for random breathalyser tests. “Double demerit” days…
This seems like more of the same. Forget trying to educate the population about the dangers of free access to information (which they will encounter anyway). Just go full Orwell! What could go wrong!
Homomorphic encryption and third parties. No need for government eyes to know axiomatically which 100pts ID verified which login, nor website or search engine to know who the real person is.
Most legislation aims to create the offence of misleading, not actually stamp out 100% of offenders. Kids who get round this will make liabilities for themselves and their parents.
Taken straight from the new regulation: “Providers of internet search engine services are not required to implement age assurance measures for end-users who are not account holders.”
How can you argue any of this is NOT in the interest of centralised surveillance and advertising identities for ADULTS when there’s such an easy way to bypass the regulation if you’re a child?
Aims to protect kids online, but it could easily go too far. It covers way more than just search engines—pretty much anything that returns info, including AI tools.
It pushes for heavy content filtering, age checks, and algorithm tweaks to hide certain results. That means more data tracking and less control over what users see. Plus, regulators can order stuff to be removed from search results, which edges into censorship. Sets the stage for broader control, surveillance, and over-moderation. slowburn additions all stack up. digital ID ,NBN monopoly ISP locked DNS servers . TR-069 etc etc. Hidden VOIP credentials. Australia is like the west's testing ground this kind of policy it seams.
51 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] thread/s
Can’t say I blame them.
Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early.
Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion?
That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.
Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.
It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.
It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.
This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.
This would be completely and utterly unenforceable in any capacity. Budget smartphones are cheap enough and ubiquitious enough that children don't need your permission or help to get one. Just as I didnt need my parents assistance to have three different mobile phones in high school when as far as they knew, I had zero phones.
Why? If you read the original legislation https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you are a scumbag social media network and you harvest someone's government ID. You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you don't try to keep young kids away from the toxic cesspool that is your service, filled with bots and boomers raving about climate change and reposting Sky News.
This absolutely stuffs those businesses who prey on their users, at least for the formative years.
And when I think about it like that? I have no problem with it, nor the fact it's a pain to implement.
The framing that explicit material is bad for kids, while probably true, is besides the point. Lots of things a parent could expose a child to could be bad, but it's always been seen as up to the parent to decide.
What the government should do is ensure that parents have the tools to raise their kids in the way they feel is appropriate. For example, they could require device manufactures implement child-modes or that ISP provide tools for content moderation which would puts parents in control. This instead places the the state in the parental role with it's entire citizenry.
We see this in the UK a lot too. This idea that parents can't be trusted to be good parents and that people can't be trusted with their own freedom so we need the state to look after us seems to be an increasing popular view. I despise it, but for whatever reason that seems to be the trend in the West today – people want the state to take on a parental role in their lives. Perhaps aging demographics has something to do with it.
Why should this be the government's responsibility rather than the parents'?
I feel a lot of Australians think the government is more mollycoddling than it is, it's hard to think of an actual policy in Australia that is outside of the norm of the Western world.
https://www.spriggy.com.au/mobile
2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law
2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
2031: Australian ISPs must enforce the login restrictions because some sites are refusing to and there are loopholes
2033: Australian ISPs must provide the government with a list of people who visited this list of specific sites, with dates and times of those visits
2035: you must be logged in to visit these other specific sites, regardless of your age
2036: you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
2037: all visits to all sites must be logged in
2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded
2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age
2040: all visits to all sites will be reported to the government
2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Australian politicians, police, and a good chunk of the population would love this.
Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It's all "beer and barbies on the beach" but that's all actually illegal.
Not quietly, I don't think. Not like Australia is known for freedom and human rights. It's known for expeditionary wars, human rights abuses, jailing whistleblowers and protesters, protecting war criminals, environmental and social destruction, and following the United States like a puppy.
Pretty sure google searches have been used in murder trials before, including the mushroom poisoning one going on right now in Victoria.
> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".
> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.
> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)
> all visits to all sites will be recorded
Something something Permanent Record.
> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?
Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.
While I yearn for the more authentic and sincere days of the internet I grew up on, I recognize very quickly by visiting x or facebook how much it isn’t that, and hasn’t been for a long time.
I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.
Uhuh.
>I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.
No you're not.
Apologies. I'm already pretty morose over the USA Supreme Court allowing age verification, which although claiming to target porn seems so likely to cudgel any "adult" or sexual material at all.
Until recently the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace has held pretty true. The online world has seen various regulations but mostly it's been taxes and businesses affected, and here we see a turn where humanity is now denied access by their governments, where we are no longer allowed to connect or to share, not without flashing our government verified id. It's such a sad lowering of the world, to such absolutely loser politicians doing such bitter pathetic anti governance for such low reasons. They impinge on the fundamental dignity & respect inherent on mankind here, in these intrusions into how we may think and connect.
Links for recent Texas age verification: https://www.wired.com/story/us-supreme-court-porn-age-verifi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799
> Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.
Not really sure what this has to do with the Australian government or Australian people. We can't even properly tax these foreign companies fairly. If we did try to regulate them the US government would step in and play the victim despite a massively one sided balance of trade due to US services being shoved down our throats. We need to aggressively pursue digital sovereignty.
It seems like it would make more sense to implement it at the browser level. Let the website return a header (ala RTA) or trigger some JavaScript API o indicate that the browser should block the tab until the user verifies their age.
It isn’t. For as long as I can remember it’s been wildly authoritarian, and it seems Australians harbour a fetish for the rules that would make even the average German blush.
Hopefully times have changed (though I don’t think they have), but about 20 years ago, standard fare on the road was to provide essentially no driver training, and then aggressively enforce draconian traffic rules. New drivers can’t drive at night. New drivers have to abide by lower speed limits than other drivers. Police stop traffic for random breathalyser tests. “Double demerit” days…
This seems like more of the same. Forget trying to educate the population about the dangers of free access to information (which they will encounter anyway). Just go full Orwell! What could go wrong!
Most legislation aims to create the offence of misleading, not actually stamp out 100% of offenders. Kids who get round this will make liabilities for themselves and their parents.
How can you argue any of this is NOT in the interest of centralised surveillance and advertising identities for ADULTS when there’s such an easy way to bypass the regulation if you’re a child?
It pushes for heavy content filtering, age checks, and algorithm tweaks to hide certain results. That means more data tracking and less control over what users see. Plus, regulators can order stuff to be removed from search results, which edges into censorship. Sets the stage for broader control, surveillance, and over-moderation. slowburn additions all stack up. digital ID ,NBN monopoly ISP locked DNS servers . TR-069 etc etc. Hidden VOIP credentials. Australia is like the west's testing ground this kind of policy it seams.