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https://www.techdirt.com/2024/09/10/aussie-govt-age-verification-went-from-privacy-nightmare-to-mandatory-in-a-year/>
"Over the last few years, it’s felt like the age verification debate has gotten
progressively stupider. People keep insisting that it must be necessary, and
when others point out that there are serious privacy and security concerns that
will likely make things worse, not better, we’re told that we have to do it
anyway.
Let’s head down under for just one example. Almost exactly a year ago, the
Australian government released a report on age verification, noting that the
technology was simply a privacy and security nightmare. At the time, the
government felt that mandating such a technology was too dangerous:
“It is clear from the roadmap at present, each type of age verification or
age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness
or implementation issues,” the government’s response to the roadmap said.
The technology must work effectively without circumvention, must be able to
be applied to pornography hosted outside Australia, and not introduce the
risk to personal information for adults who choose to access legal
pornography, the government stated.
“The roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not yet
ready to be taken.”
That’s why we were a bit surprised earlier this year when the government
announced a plan to run a pilot program for age verification. However, as we
pointed out at the time, just hours after the announcement of that pilot
program, it was revealed that a mandated verification database used for bars
and clubs in Australia was breached, revealing sensitive data on over 1 million
people.
You would think that might make the government pause and think more deeply
about this. But apparently that’s not the way they work down under. The
government is now exploring plans to officially age-gate social media."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
