How will Australia's under-16 social media ban work? We asked the law's enforcer (2024)

From top AU banning official:<p><pre><code> all [age verification methods] have privacy implications. There was big concern with providing government ID. But there are digital identity providers... </code></pre> This is the point where Gov officials shift from talking about privacy concerns to pretending.<p>In this case, she&#x27;s predictably offloading responsibility to a 3rd party provider. I will guess the official is minimally aware that leaks are nearly inevitable (partially due to lax laws) and all of that ID data will be leaked eventually. Probably by a 3rd party to the 3rd party.<p>Why deceive the reporter and readers on privacy? Because addressing privacy is hard. It takes time, effort, <i>integrity</i> and thoughtfulness.<p>Because every Gov is loaded with depts that exploit privacy failings to their own advantage.<p>Because elections are funded by lobbyists that use our data against us.<p>Add those up and there is so much pushback against respecting privacy - you could launch a spacecraft with it.

As an Australian parent of a 14-year-old, I find social media to be a significant hassle. Yet, I know delivery drivers who are far more technologically proficient than many government leaders. I had expected that, even if the public face was somewhat just a pretty face and a good talker, there would be a knowledgeable team working behind the scenes. However, this ban has convinced me that there isn’t a single informed voice involved in the process.

The privacy concerns and “ID everyone” are the boring, standard dystopian parts of this, perfectly in line with the government-by-nannying that Canberra types enjoy.<p>The better question is what counts as social media? Is HN social media that under 16yo Australians need to be kept away from?

It can&#x27;t work. Teens will just jump to mastodon instances. I can even see it being the case where running an instance become like being able to make fake ids or sell some weed or something, one person will do it and be cool have friends because of that. Parents won&#x27;t know about it and it won&#x27;t raise any flags in logs if done well.<p>Not to mention just using a VPN or something.

In short: they have no idea.<p>They had no idea when it was passed, and this article confirms the same because &quot;there&#x27;s been promising research you do it by &lt;thing&gt;&quot;.

Grand Censor Fascist Julie Inman Grant, Cyber Karen of Australia, will get her wish - excommunication of the Australian people.<p>Social media will block Australian users of all ages. Australian users were really not that valuable anyway, and this just isn’t worth the trouble.

Poor Grant in this article was always against the law but now has to talk as if it&#x27;s a good idea.<p>I looked into who was pushing for this law; a personality on a Murdoch owned radio station, along with Murdoch&#x27;s News corp, a TV advertising company owner, and Jonathan Haidt as mentioned in the article, who is an anti-woke anti-academia hack <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3quarksdaily.com&#x2F;3quarksdaily&#x2F;2024&#x2F;07&#x2F;why-academics-are-annoyed-with-jonathan-haidt-again.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;3quarksdaily.com&#x2F;3quarksdaily&#x2F;2024&#x2F;07&#x2F;why-academics-...</a><p>Feels weird and gross to me that legacy media &#x2F; advertising companies are crying over kids&#x27;s mental health when they&#x27;ve been targeting teenagers with impossible standards and negatively influencing their self image for decades.<p>My personal conspiracy theory is that it was done to avoid scrutiny of advertising practices. A few months before academics started publishing findings on how problematic social media ads are; unhealthy foods, gambling, alcohol, and just plain scams. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.admscentre.org.au&#x2F;adobservatory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.admscentre.org.au&#x2F;adobservatory&#x2F;</a><p>With &#x27;kids&#x27; removed from social media, advertisers can better get away with less savoury stuff.

&gt; How will Australia&#x27;s under-16 social media ban work?<p>Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!<p>It won&#x27;t.<p>There are a couple of ways I see it going.<p>1) Let&#x27;s just say there are 300 days left before the ban takes effect. Option 1 is that in 298 days, after every tech person in the world telling them how stupid and ineffective the idea is, and when the dumb populace realises &quot;wait now <i>everybody</i> is going to have to verify their id to use social media?&quot;, the law gets repealed. This will happen quietly and without any media circus, because Australia has no independent media, OR:<p>2) The ban goes into effect. On the same day, teens abandon social media en-masse. Nobody knows where they&#x27;ve gone. Weirdly, these events correlate with a spike in VPN subscriptions encrypted traffic to decentralised services.<p>I&#x27;m hoping for the second one - a more security aware next-generation would be a good thing.

<p><pre><code> ...But there are digital identity providers, like one called Yoti, that can estimate someone&#x27;s age using facial recognition technology. But we do want to make sure there is not discrimination, or bias, and some of these technologies are less accurate depending on the kind of face being scanned. I met with an age assurance provider last week in Washington, D.C., who is using an AI-based system that looks at hand movements and has a 99% success rate. </code></pre> Both of these are interesting: first part implies that face -&gt; age is considered no-go even with NN and even outside academia. And the second part, does that mean one can potentially ask a person to show a hand, or even feed a video stream of hand(s) moving, and make algorithmically generated remarks about the person or the group?

&gt; And medical research has shown based on your hand movement, it can identify your age.<p>She may not be lying. She may just be a big enough fucking idiot to believe the AV industry&#x27;s lies.<p>But my guess is that they&#x27;re both knowingly lying.

They should just ban social media for everyone and see what happens.

Homomorphic encryption and trusted third parties. It&#x27;s what the Australian Privacy Commission, and the CSIRO (government funded (commonwealth) scientific industrial research organisation) said would probably work.

They won’t. They can’t. It’s baked into the legislation!

Forget what the privacy commissioner says, it’ll be whatever the government’s flavour of the month consultancy tells them to do. As per usual.

&gt; 84% of 8- to 12-year-olds are already on social media. And interestingly, we asked, &quot;Were your parents or any adults aware that you were setting up these social media accounts early?&quot; And 80% of them said yes. And in 90% of cases, it was parents that helped them set up their accounts<p>What&#x27;s preventing the parents to do the account creation verification for the kids, and then kids just taking over the account? (Unless there&#x27;s constant re-verification daily, which no apps do)<p>The only thing is that the ban gives parents some way to say &quot;no&quot; but given enough nagging...<p>Or, you know, they can find someone a few years elder, just like when buying booze and cigarettes.