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!
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Thank god. They should ban it for those over 16 too
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 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.
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I know it's not perfect and everyone here is losing their mind, but getting kids off of social media until they're more adultish is good parenting.
Right, so shouldn't parents be responsible for that and not the government?
In theory, fuck yes.
In practice, Parents participation made it this bad. While Corporations made it epidemically worse and normalized this shit.
But im not in the decision making circle on this, so feel free to ignore me.
I don't think anyone in these comment sections is in decision-making circles lol. Though I am in agreement that limiting access to social media for minors would probably be a good thing. I think that could be done by removing the profit incentive from corporations to target young audiences. Like stricter laws/bans against advertising to minors
Socialogically many Fenale trends start/come from the preteen age base. Its targeted purposefully.
There was a good interview in Rolling Stone with Carl Newman of the band The New Pornographers. Last year the band's drummer was arrested and later convicted of sexually pestering children and CSAM possession. (Yes the name is an unfortunate coincidence but was their name for many years before this drummer was a member, and it refers to something else).
Carl talked about how devastated the band is by all of this, and a family member who works in the court system gave him some advice, talking about how pedophiles are always looking for an opportunity, and how you really should not have anything about your children online because they WILL use it no matter how innocent, and how you should watch your kids incredibly carefully online, that it's not just kids from vulnerable families getting trafficked.
I see that it feels intrusive, but I myself read a lot of judicial decisions online, and the pedophile ones are always HORRIFIC. Just because there isn't a physical victim doesn't make it better. One case the police were notified by an ISP about a guy and they went to his house and found a child sized sex doll in his home. One thing leads to another. A lot of the testimony by men who have not committed physical crimes talk about how they were depressed and just began going into more extremes of porn, and just ended up beginning to watch CSAM as an extension of this. They would get phallometric testing which would show they are sexually oriented to children so this isn't always true, but the easy access to literally anything via the Internet sure isn't helping anything.
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.
I'm of two minds on this. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Agreed, the slippery slope argument people like to trot out is old, and the government already knows who is using Facebook.
The problem I see is handing more personally identifiable information over to corporations that are both prone to misusing their power and the potential for hackers to obtain that information.
This will likely end with a push to the mygov ID system once a breach has impacted Australians and resistance is low.
The law in EU specifically says that age verification needs to minimize the amount of information collected and GDPR still applies to this data. If implemented correctly the service will only verify your date of birth. Besides, most Facebook users share way more already. Facebook already knows everyone's education, finances, relationship status and has 1000 fotos of their face. The idea that sharing your ID number with them changes anything is silly.
To expand a little Australian politics has a bad habit of coming up with grandiose solutions to problems that they can push for headlines then worrying about details afterwards. If we had GDPR like privacy and data security laws in place before this it would be better. If we had a clear and understandable reporting system for data breaches, better again. If we had actual education programs to demystify and explain Internet awareness and literacy. If we had control over the scope of data harvesting.
But no we jump straight to the headline, details and workability can come sometime later.
Oh cool we solved identity theft then, right? Right? Seriously this is a poorly veiled mechanism to have Internet usage tied to specific identities, the people pushing for it are not even going to be the public faces we see doing the pushing. I also find it really telling that they have weaponised the grief of a mother who lost a child to suicide after sustained online bullying, but are choosing to ignore the fact that youth advocates are outright telling them that loss of online safe spaces and community will be jeopardising the safety of marginalised kids such as the LGBTQI+ community. How many suicides is an acceptable trade off for them?
My own kids will be forced to log out of YouTube, this makes it harder for me to monitor their usage as now it will all be anonymous and as much as I can helicopter around them at home, as the government seeming wants me to do, I won't be able to see any of the content they are consuming when I am not directly behind them. The current method is so smooth and frictionless that the kids don't bother with finding workarounds, the new system...
My take, leave the kids logged in with accounts and start holding social media companies accountable for the content they provide. It will be imminently more traceable when this stuff is reported and knowing they could be fined hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars when they fail their subscribers might convince these companies to do better.
Lastly, the government is already seeing alternatives spring up to take over these niches in the ecosystem. The fact that the ban hasn't even gone into effect yet and the whack-a-mole has already begun really says something. The only way these current laws can be salvaged once this cycle starts will be to institute blanket bans, rather than targeted. When every website with a comment section begins to ask for ID things are going to get messy, at that point OpSec goes out the window.
Apparently the eSafety commissioner can bring fines of up to $850k per user whose data has been mismanaged, but I don't see that happening. Discord leaked a bunch of details recently and to the best of my knowledge all that was required of them was a pinky promise to try harder.
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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