Yep, I’m not against proper age checking as long as it’s developed carefully with a secure/private by design mentality, but this government’s self-imposed deadline and focus on ticking political boxes will effectively put consumer choice and privacy far below the interests of tech companies and age assurance industry investors. It’s looking like a familiar story - outsourcing responsibility for the practical implementation to questionable interests and promising “industry standards” and “safeguards” to protect consumers which are then poorly enforced or not practical to enforce. That’ll replicate the fundamental shortcomings of our privacy regulation more broadly which have made poor policies/practices and data breaches so routine.

Getting a 404 on the link, at least in Firefox. Seems to need the number at the end:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/anz-nab-and-bigger-for-you-bendigos-ever-bigger-greed,20151

Just watched it and yeah, that’s an even more depressing picture of how it was covered. The headlines I’d seen were:

“Social media age verification possible but laden with risks, landmark study warns” (ABC)

“Trial of tech that could be used to keep Australian under-16s off social media finds some errors ‘inevitable’” (Guardian)

Those stories at least didn’t just parrot the government’s spin - trouble is they made the study sound more sceptical/balanced than it is and didn’t question its credibility.

Haven’t seen much scrutiny over the “landmark” report released by the government a couple of weeks ago which forms the basis for the practical implementation of this system.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/age-assurance-technology-trial-final-report

It’s not an academic study from a trusted institution or even just an established think tank, but from an organisation that sort of popped up out of nowhere some years ago which appears to provide paid certification services for age assurance companies, while also evidently offering “research” for governments on the viability of implementing these schemes. They’d previously done a similar report for the UK government, which makes me rather cynical about our government’s motivations in choosing them. The news reporting on its release was a bit strange as it made it sound like the report was quite sceptical, but you don’t need to spend much time looking at it to see it’s very much telling the government what it wanted to hear (given they’d already committed to implementing such a scheme).

The companies people will be required to provide their documents/biometrics to also kind of popped up out of nowhere, and these are the sorts of folks behind them: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/07/31/the-online-safety-act-is-forcing-brits-to-hand-over-personal-data-to-unregulated-overseas-corporations-with-questionable-privacy-records/