Software testers hired by Australia’s government to determine how to enforce the world’s first national teen social media ban have worked on defence and election contracts, but they would use another experience to guide their study: Wrangling their own children online.
“We’re all parents of kids of various ages and we’re definitely aware of all the little tricks kids do,” said Andrew Hammond, general manager at tech contractor KJR, which would conduct the trial of about 1,200 randomly chosen Australians from January to March.
“Kids are quite resourceful, so we’ll definitely have our eyes and ears open,” added Hammond, whose company’s previous projects included checking deployment software for Australian troops in Afghanistan.
Illustration: Tania Chou
The study, one of the biggest-ever trials of age-checking technology, would likely set the course for lawmakers and tech platforms around the world as they navigate a push to age-restrict social media at a time of growing concern about youth mental health and data collection.
From late next year, platforms including Meta’s Instagram, Elon Musk’s X, TikTok and Snapchat must show Australians they are taking reasonable steps to keep out users under 16 or face fines up to A$49.5 million (US$32.2 million). Google’s YouTube, a classroom staple, is exempt.
However, the legislation does not specify what those reasonable steps must be. That is down to the trial, overseen by the Age Check Certification Scheme, a British consulting firm, which expects about 12 participating tech firms and must give recommendations by the middle of next year.
Options include age estimation, where a user’s video selfie is biometrically analysed then deleted; age verification, where a user uploads identifying documents to a third-party provider, which sends an anonymous confirmation “token” to the platform; and age inference, where a user’s email address is cross-checked with other accounts.
“The approach the Australian government takes could influence how other countries approach online age checks for social media content,” said Julie Dawson, chief policy and regulatory officer at age-verification company Yoti, which does age checks for Meta’s new system of heightened privacy settings for teenage Instagram users.
Some European countries and US states have legislated age minimums for social media, but none has rolled out an enforcement regime due to legal challenges based on preserving privacy and free speech.
Even lawmakers in Australia’s conservative opposition, whose support was needed to get the centre-left government’s ban through parliament, warned the ban could be used to justify collecting personal information — an echo of a post this month from X owner Musk that it “seems like a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians.”
Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowlands told the Australian parliament the ban was “not about government mandating any form of technology or demanding any personal information handed over to social media companies.”
A last-minute change to the law stipulates that platforms asking for identifying documents must offer an alternative age-verification method.
Pressure to block minors from parts of the Internet has been around since pornography and gambling Web sites overran the early World Wide Web. It has taken on a new urgency since a Meta whistleblower leaked internal e-mails in 2021 purportedly showing knowledge that its products were harmful to young users. Meta has said the documents were misinterpreted.
Rising demand has spurred technological development, but no product is fool-proof yet in combining accuracy, privacy, security and user-friendliness, said Tony Allen, CEO of the Age Check Certification Scheme, which would test products for Australia on those criteria.
Adding to the challenge, many people in the age range targeted by bans do not have common identifying documents, such as a driver’s licence or credit card.
That helps the case for age-checking technology involving analysis of a person’s features, such as facial wrinkles or their hands.
Yoti said its accuracy has improved to the point where it can pick more than 99 percent of people aged 13-17 as under 25. It says its standard deviation of error in guessing the age of an 18-year-old is just over one year.
That may not yet be accurate enough for an age restriction in a country of 27 million people, said Konstantin Poptodorov, director of fraud and identity for digital identification company LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who noted the rapid improvements and uptake of technologies such as facial recognition in the past decade.
Meta’s policy director for Australia and New Zealand, Mia Garlick, said Yoti has been beneficial to enforcing Instagram’s teen privacy policy, but added that appearance-wise “some people grow up really quickly, and some people don’t.”
Meta did not know if expanding its Yoti arrangement would satisfy the Australian ban, because “we don’t know if what we do currently is going to be considered ‘reasonable steps’,” she added.
Providers that rely on uploaded identification documents might participate in the trial, but “almost the whole ethos behind the way age assurance works is ‘we don’t want to collect any data’,” said Allen.
Software testers would ask some trial participants to try and fool the technology with appearance-adjusting filters, but would weed out only the products that failed to stop workarounds and were deemed cheap and scalable, he said.
Allen had no front-runner for what product he would recommend, but he did predict one recommendation: “There should be choice for consumers.”
“They should all be as effective and meet a certain level of assurance, but if you’re looking for a silver bullet you won’t find it,” he added.
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