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Australia's been down this road before with the failed 2019 age verification bill and the Online Safety Act. The technical implementation challenges are enormous - from VPN circumvention to privacy risks of ID verification systems.
Well the age assurance is only for logged-in users, so they can just log out.
Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect. Can’t say I blame them.
https://www.intelligence.gov.au/news/asio-annual-threat-asse...
That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.
Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.
Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.
It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.
It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.
This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.
As an australian citizen i'm all for it. Look at how the internet and social media has destroyed our current youth and their naivety and sense of emotional security. They all act like they're living in soviet russia at this point and have become so hard and jaded. Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early. Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion…
Nothing says “not living in Soviet Russia” like having to show your papers to access information.
Australia's been down this road before with the failed 2019 age verification bill and the Online Safety Act. The technical implementation challenges are enormous - from VPN circumvention to privacy risks of ID verification systems.
Well the age assurance is only for logged-in users, so they can just log out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the age assurance is only for logged-in users, so they can just log out.
The article doesn't quite spell it out but I assume you won't be able to turn off safe search unless you log in with a verified 18+ account.
A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society. That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access. Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuf…
Complains about mollycoddling.
> a better approach would be to limit
Immediately proposes new mollycoddling scheme.
As an australian citizen i'm all for it. Look at how the internet and social media has destroyed our current youth and their naivety and sense of emotional security. They all act like they're living in soviet russia at this point and have become so hard and jaded. Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early. Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion…
And at no point does it ever occur to you to demand proof that measures such as this will have the desired effect... or, indeed, that the desired effect is indeed worth achieving at all.
As an australian citizen i'm all for it. Look at how the internet and social media has destroyed our current youth and their naivety and sense of emotional security. They all act like they're living in soviet russia at this point and have become so hard and jaded. Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early. Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion…
> They all act like they're living in soviet russia Nothing says “not living in Soviet Russia” like having to show your papers to access information.