AV: “here’s how we protect children, sign here!”
Australia: “Awesome! <pays money>”
AV: “…aaaaand here’s what we *won’t* do…”
Australia: “…um, wait, what?”
Age Verification is a grift.
Separate, but linked, was a $6.5 million trial commissioned by the government to investigate how a social media minimum age could be enforced. Its findings would inform the “reasonable steps” established by the government that social media companies would have to take when gauging a user’s age in order to enforce the teen social media ban.
The Age Assurance Technology Trial’s winning tenderer was a coalition led by UK company Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS). The coalition would be responsible for assessing “age assurance technologies” — like digital ID, facial analysis and other novel methods of figuring out someone’s age online — for “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness for use in the Australian context”, and publishing a report on its findings.
The ACCS project plan, written in November before the law was passed or the tender was publicly awarded, said the group would test the technologies for detecting fake documents, deepfaked video and other security exploits.
Several months later, after the law had been passed and the tender awarded, the ACCS published an evaluation proposal plan that laid out which “circumvention” methods would and wouldn’t be tested.
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