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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age).

Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).

Reminds of the 'chilling effect' of measures of bygone decades.

My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.

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How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?

All you need to do is look up the mental health stats since the iPhone release to see why parents are massively concerned. There has never been a time when an alert parent didn’t have a fair idea of what info a kid was exposed to. This is why going to university is such an awakening.

Now the parents basically need a background in infosec to stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content. That only works in your household. Do you stop play dates? Single your kids out as weird by banning all device use?

Societal norms do not move at the speed of technology, so regulation needs to be applied unless there’s another alternative.

> stop their kids accessing hardcore porn, violence and other mind bending content.

Such sites are not among the social media sites required to verify Australian's ID/ages, which hints that protecting kids is merely a pretence.

They are planning to enforce access to these sites with the same mechanism.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/consultation-cooperation...

But it's the internet; for every one site that implements this, there will be a thousand that don't, and for every one that the government takes down, another thousand will pop up. And that's just the actual porn sites, there's millions of other ways to get access, be it websites, privacy-conscious apps, file sharing, etc. If people want porn they'll find it.

Of course, it being more difficult, technically involved, or otherwise shady will probably reinforce a message that it's not normal, because another issue is the normalization of porn to the point where people watch it in public. I'm also very aware I am just echoing the same thing an older generation has said about things like raunchy video clips on MTV, magazines like Playboy, movies with Marilyn Monroe, and painters painting a hint of ankle.

Well but that content is also distributed over this social media sites.

How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?

That's exactly why there's a suggestion legacy media are driving this.

It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.

No, the argument is, the under 16 of today will be hooked on social media and will never read “classic” medias when they are older.

I think that’s the cover story (because I agree it’s extremely valid).

> How many under 16s read newspapers or watch news anyway?

Adults do, and the OP's argument is that everyone (not just U16's) will be driven away by the changes. Being asked to provide ID may result in some just noping out or not signing up to newer services when they otherwise might have.

Absolutely nothing you describe will be affected by an internet ID. And it doesn't even "Help a little", it just makes many things much worse.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/03/hours-after-aussie-govt-...

If 16 year olds do indeed access pornography with such an amount of naiveté, there might really be a problem. But there is no indication of a problem, is there?

> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified (in order to confirm their age). > > Depending on the degree of cooperation (/coercion) the Australian government has with social media companies, the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts (or, at least, they'll be made more difficult, especially for non-technical folk).

This isn't a given. It is quite possible to build a reasonably anonymous system to verify age at signup.

As a simplified model: the government creates a website where with your government id/login, they will give you an age-verification-valid-for-5-minutes token - basically just "holder is 16+" signed with their signature & the current time. Websites request a new valid token at signup. End result is that government only knows you're _maybe_ doing _something_ 16+, and the website doesn't know who you are, just that you're old enough (this is clearly improveable, it's just a basic example).

Whether anything like this will be implemented is a hard question of course. The current alternatives I've seen seem to be a fully privatised version of this, where a private company has a video call where you hold up your ID - that eliminates the government, but seems like a whole bunch of privacy concerns in itself too (not to mention being wildly inefficient & probably not very reliable).

This is one of the main motivating examples for attribute-based credentials, which provably only reveal the selected attribute to verifiers.

Why not lock device/accounts as minor and put onus on school and parents to ensure devices are appropriately tagged? At least for pre-teens I strongly think it shall work.

Because it will take about 1 month till there is some service the parents will want the kids to use that wont be available on such device (a kids show, a kids game, a page necessary for homework). So, they will have strong motivation to not label them as such.

At that point, what if parents just let their kids borrow their driver's licenses to use social media? There's no technical solution to bad parenting.

The only reasonable solution that doesn't infringe on privacy is to give parents the tools to limit their children's internet use, and presume, outside those bounds, that people are adults.

of course there's no perfectly privacy preserving solution for this, but ... zero-knowledge proofs have come a pretty long way.

if I understand correctly it's possible to give 16+ people tokens and then they can make the signups (transactions with these tokens) and then check that the transaction is valid (that it came from some valid token without knowing which token), while also making sure that folks can't just fake spend someone's tokens -- this is how the new Monero version is going to work after all.

https://www.getmonero.org/2024/04/27/fcmps.html

Of course as others mentioned trading identities (tokens) is trivial. (As I expect not-yet-16 olds will start stealing identities/logins of older people.)

Yeah, as you mentioned, token-sharing breaks this. I think any solution ultimately has to put the onus on the parents. And if the parents aren't responsible enough to pay attention to what their kid is doing online, then it's probably for the best that the kid have access to an online peer group over social media

I'd never accept this disgrace.

Sorry, what's the implication here, what is the disgrace? Why parental controls are bad? (Or what was implied was a /s tag? :))

Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form. I can control my child without the government.

> I can control my child

Lies every parents tell themselves. Either they will watch porn at age 11 at school or at a friend, or you isolate them from society and they resent you forever.

You can't control every aspect of your child's real life or online activities, that's naive and I don't believe you actually have children, let alone teenagers.

Whether GP can control their kids or not it's besides the point, which I think lies with:

> Government controlled access to internet is a disgrace in any form.

And in fact it's not a "disgrace", it's outright dangerous, a ready half-step to totalitarian control. Regardless whether one trusts their current government or not, it is a threat to democracy and freedom that can be activated by any later regime.

You shouldn't want to control every aspect of a child's life. You control what you can and should control, and the kid is aware of that, and you let them decide the rest. They will do things you don't want them to do, and that's fine. That's part of growing up.

What you don't want is to say "I can't control every part of my kid's life, so I need to government to come in and control the remainder."

Indeed, but I don't find that amount of control reasonable. I can do enough control to be completely fine.

You’re right that it’s possible, absolutely. The problem is the government would first have to want to do that. If they’re planning to hoover up social media usage data then they probably won’t.

So what's the most likely outcome here? Savvy 15 year olds "buying" accounts of older people? IRC and email making a comeback?

This comes up on every single HN thread about the topic, but I don’t understand how people aren’t seeing the obvious abuse angle:

Create a market for anonymous age verification tokens. People pay $5 to someone to create an age authorization for them. 17 year old kid (who is old enough under this law) spends all day creating anonymous age auth tokens to sell to people who want them.

Entire system subverted with profit motive.

The next phase of the argument is to argue for rate limiting or extra logging, but the more you force that the more you degrade privacy or introduce unreasonable restrictions. “Sorry, I can’t sign up for the wiki today because I already used my quota of 2 government age checks today”. Still leaves plenty of room for 17 year old kids to earn $10 a day farming out their age checks.

The entire argument that anonymous crypto primitive will solve this problem is tiresome.

this is the same argument as "why have government id cards, someone could just use a fake beard and use their older classmates id". Any system allows for some gaps, similar to how creditcard transactions make transactions safer but on either side of that transaction there some "insurance" and some leeway if someone really wanted to.

The difference is that I can’t mint infinite ID cards, and it is much harder to get a skeptical person to accept a photo ID of the wrong person.

in person? sure, that's harder, but we're talking about online services, right?

many times verification is simply uploading a photo, GenAI can make a nice fake ID.

are these id verification sites linked to government databases? for usual KYC it's enough to save the photo and do the minimal sanity check, no need to phone home an ask Big Brother.

> why have government id cards...

...for the internet is a perfectly sane question. There are good reason we don't have those as well and these reason vastly outclass ineffective user protections.

The same applies to effectively all possible solutions for age verification, no?

Even if you have a perfect mechanism, 17 years old can create real age-verified accounts and then sell the username and password afterwards. Selling age-verification tokens directly would likely be harder than just swapping those login details, since it's very easy to make the tokens time-limited (in practice normal use would probably be some kind of oauth-style redirect flow, so they'd really only have to be valid for a few seconds).

This same argument applies to adults buying alcohol for teenagers too. The determined teenager with money can definitely find a way to get alcohol, but it doesn't mean the age restrictions on purchases are pointless.

Imo it's a bit pointless to worry about high-speed black markets trading in signed tokens when the current most common alternative is a popup with an "I promise I am over 18" button. If society agrees some things should be difficult to access if you're underage, then we can definitely do better than that as a solution.

I can buy booze without an ID or token. You have to match that. And yes, I look perfectly youthful...

Germany has a system in their ID cards that allows anonymous age verification. No one uses it but it’s a technical marvel in my opinion.

The site asks for specific read permissions and the user can decide if he wants to grant them.

One of these permissions is age verification.

You put the phone on the ID card and there is a cryptographic proof that the user connecting to the site is in possession of an ID of a person above 16 (which he of course could have stolen).

So it is technically totally feasible to have good data privacy AND age verification.

It isn't a technical marvel, it is technical bureaucracy. There is a reason people don't want to use it.

Also once implemented and widely adopted, the state would obviously increase demands on usage. This isn't rocket science.

I understand the cryptographic principle. That isn't the problem here.

yeah, “technical” is not the right adjective, rather the marvel (to me) is the fact that a government managed to deploy a privacy friendly electronic ID system based on sound cryptographic principles.

it’s a marvel because, well, as you put it, there’s all this bureaucracy and when I first discovered it was implemented and every single new electronic ID has this capability since a couple of years, my jaw dropped.

But fully agree the process and the backend itself are not very usable at the moment.

Maybe my expectations around government digitization are too loo though.

It's hardly an age verification if it just requires the bearer to have an adult's ID card.

You borrow your friend's card, or you "borrow" your parent's card, or you pay someone who sees this market opportunity.

I think it's ridiculous how the lawgivers are telling the companies to just nerd harder, but they're definitely going to have to nerd harder than that.

I think it’s better than transmitting everything including the biometric picture and requiring the camera to be on.

How would you implement age verification?

They know, of course, that they're giving the nerds an impossible challenge.

Then when they can't achieve it they can say, "well we tried the non-authoritarian way and the nerds didn't oblige, now we're forced to bring out the brownshirts. Papers please!"

Too complicated and no benefit.

Theoretically these double blind systems could be secure, practically I would never trust any of their systems and will opt out of signing up.

Also this fail to account for obviously visible political motivation and further development. Nope, bad idea.

> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat

For anyone that thinks this is tin foil hat stuff, remember the Australian government passed a law that Facebook and Google MUST pay Rupert Murdoch money everytime someone clicks a link on one of those sites to a Rupert Murdoch owned media company (basically all of them).

Yes, really. It only applies to Google and Facebook, and money must be paid to only Rupert Murdoch.

Utterly lost the plot.

Goals

Seriously though. While I don't like him even slightly, Murdoch is legit a business genius.

Imagine being powerful enough that you can bend an entire country to your will. That's amazing. Sociopathic probably, but amazing nonetheless.

Just a reminder that you can do this on municipal and state levels with relative ease

And in microstates too

A random municipality in the US may have more commerce or highly valued property to tax than many countries, and they draw less attention than big municipalities

A mayor or board decision from a 200 person town in Los Angeles County, for example, may never garner any challenge or news by being next to Los Angeles City which takes all local and national press time

I used to think that Zuckerberg was going to do the same with Facebook. But it seems like he was too focussed on the ad revenue and making the metaverse happen.

And now Musk has come along and stolen the kingmaker role.

> the Aus Govt will be able to access citizen social media data with relative ease. So no more pseudo anonymous accounts

This isn't necessarily true.

It came as a surprise to me, but many "Government Digital ID" systems use Verifiable Credentials[1][2] and Decentralized Identifiers[3].

I live in BC, Canada. I have installed the BC Wallet app[4] which is open source code[5].

With the BC Wallet app, I can create an account using my BC drivers license.

Then I can interact with any third-party app that uses the BC Wallet as an authentication system. If the only thing this app wants to do is confirm my age, it can ask me to reveal my age. I reveal my age (the only piece of data I am choosing to reveal), and the app now knows and can trust (as long as it trusts the BC Wallet) that this is my age.

And the BC Wallet app servers/government never know when I am using the BC Wallet app.

Turns out the future may not be as dystopian as we once thought it may be.

EDIT:

I see now from the article the following:

> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.

What could have been privacy preserving seems like it won't be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verifiable_credentials [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-overview/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier [4] https://digital.gov.bc.ca/digital-trust/digital-credentials/... [5] https://github.com/bcgov/bc-wallet-mobile

Proving identity is a hard problem. What’s to stop a kid from grabbing his father’s drivers license and setting up this wallet because eg his father is never going to do it

Secondarily what’s to stop an 18-year-old having hundreds of tiktok accounts and selling them for a dollar to whatever kid wants at is high school

every social media site is going to have to implement Australia’s 2fa system?

aside from limitations like, you can only setup 1 app, or things like 2f authentication. Usually things like this are stopped by laws and enforcement causing consequences. I'm pretty sure that sort of thing would be considered identity theft. same thing as stealing their father's drivers license and opening bank accounts in their name.

There are physical barriers and there are barriers that are enforced manually. Same with speeding. you are not allowed to drive faster than 60. even though your car can drive faster, laws in combination with police, traffic cams and speed traps will make sure it's enforced.

I don’t get it so you’re gonna do what to a 15-year-old who is an ‘identity thief’ so that he can go on TikTok? What’s the punishment please?

Put them in chains and onto a stinky sail vessel enroute to Australia... oh wait

The modern equivalent would be to repost all their last year tictocs, again.

A cruel and unusial punishment.

Cancel all his accounts and delete all his postings... _without_ a backup.

This seems like a different and fraudulent category of problem.

The point is that it's possible to create third-party authentication systems that require proving your age and the only extra thing the third-party learns is a verifiable age and the government does not get any information at all.

All this being said, I took a look at the article in question and saw this:

> Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.

So what could have been achieved with no invasion or privacy now seems like it must be achieved with an invasion of privacy.

It will never be privacy preserving. Once established and users a hooked up to the service, they mandate further data sharing. Poof.

> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this, due to them seeing the writing on the wall and knowing 'social media' is their biggest threat. If young people get their information from sites like bluesky, twitter, podcasts and reddit, they may never watch a mainstream news program or read an online newspaper. Bad for business. This measure is a great way of eradicating some competition.

I wonder, I often see legacy media companies complain about how "new age" media (podcasts, social media, etc) is taking over. Social media has been prominent for at least a decade now and so have Podcasts. Why have so few legacy media companies looked at the writing on the wall and invest in the "new age" media instead of complaining about how it's eating at their business.

I would say NYT is one of the only media org's I've seen execute on this.

EDIT: I thought about my question a bit more and my answer for why they haven't is a "new age" media org would look very different from a traditional media org. But that just brings me back to: THEY HAD OVER A DECADE TO ADJUST.

Rupert Murdock probably literally thinks the Internet is a fad and that the ad money will come back Any Day Now (TM).

They saw the Napster/Metallica saga play out 20 years ago and thought that would never happen to their form of media

It doesn’t say that?

“Social media companies also won't be able to force users to provide government identification, including the Digital ID, to assess their age.”

Because they won't be forced to provide identification directly, they'll be forced to provide an age verification token that's linked to government identification. It's the same end result (a way to link your identity to the sites you use), but with extra steps.

And honestly with the government's track record when it comes to privacy and technology, I don't think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

It actually doesn't say that. It says:

(a) the provider provides alternative means (not involving the material and services mentioned in paragraphs (1)(a) and (b)) for an individual to assure the provider that the individual is not an age-restricted user; and (b) those means are reasonable in the circumstances.

https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi... - page 8

So it doesn't actually provide an alternative, just says the nerds need to magic one up.

Why would you have to jump to the conclusion that identity verification is required to implement this law? The simple existence of this law:

- Requires social media companies to implement rules to prevent <16 to sign up/sign in -- the onus is on them to find the solution, not on the gvt

- Enables parents to tell their <16 kids that social media is illegal

- Will likely drive a number of <16 kids to sign out (not all of them of course, but a bunch)

BigTech has been slapped in the face enough in EU to take this kind of law seriously.

It baffles me that they've gained so much power in the collective consciousness that any law that restricts their usage would have to be implemented by someone else.

I don't think you need to express any hunches when some sleuthing will reveal the interest/lobby groups, organizations, and politicians and their connections etc that pushed or advocated for this legislation.

That said, your legacy media hunch also doesn't make any sense because this writing on the wall and social media being a threat has been a thing for over twenty years now; they have fully embraced and integrated social media, and have filed lawsuits to get money from them: [0] says Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will get paid by Facebook for News Corp content, specifically in australia but this goes / went on everywhere.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/16/rupert-murdoch...

So you think that legacy media is behind this because if they could just get that pesky social media banned, those kids would shell out their allowance money to The Economist or The Washington Post? Do you know what Overwatch is? Minecraft? League of Legends?

Or maybe, just maybe, social media sites will be all too happy to gobble up the sweet sweet DATA available from an ID requirement. In the US, this would give social media access to your full name, DOB, address, height/weight/any medical restrictions, and organ donor status, which social media giants will package with all the other stuff they know about you and sell insights to any advertiser or government that flashes cash.

This has nothing to do with legacy media, that's not a threat for this age group.

This has everything to do with the mental damage inflicted by social media on developing minds, many of which end in suicide.

That but also privacy too. The damage is real, yes, but the negative effect on privacy will also be. (And the Aus gov is extremely far from any kind of principled actor in this to trust them with this experiment. Though I'm very curious of the results now that the experiment is underway anyway...)

Also, of course, quite ironic how everyone is worried about kids' mental health, while brain rot of the voting age population of "the West" had been ongoing for decades. And now the eggs of neopopulism have hatched. (One more unfortunate but quite interesting experiment.)

> Every single Australian's ID will have to be verified

Keep in mind all Australians got those IDs from the government in the first place...

Australia was already fucked more than the U.S. before that regarding Police state status... But all world states are walking toward this

Australians with dual citizenship have an out at least.

I very much doubt this.

I would like to see some evidence before I buy this conspiracy theory. If anything, I feel like legacy media is too lazy and entrenched to even consider this

Legacy media are indeed lazy and stupid, but all that's stopping them is the Australian parliament, who are lazier and stupider.

So lazy that they successfully lobbied governments to ruin their relation with big tech companies like facebook, google etc

To give newspapers 100s of millions of free money just for the “privilege” of linking to their article, a “link tax”.

They are lazy about reporting news without a bias, but they are perfectly active when it comes to lobbying.

I would be happy to see any links to evidence of this

Proof:

https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-se...

It's called the news media bargaining code. Technically speaking, the law isn't enforced since Google/Meta chose to voluntarily pay the link tax, rather than be put on the list that would force them to pay. But, at the end of the day it's the same effect.

Don't forget the best part, they will also get fined for not linking!!

Brilliant!! The incorruptible free market of Australia in all its glory.

> My personal hunch is legacy media is largely driving this

The level of conspiracy theory about the “mainstream media” feels out of control at times. Legacy media’s control over the population is already gone (as you stated), with what leverage would they be forcing this?

Occam’s Razor: voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids. As a parent I hear about these concerns a lot. That is what is driving this, no matter how badly thought out the implementation is.

Australia doesn't (yet) have a thriving podcast and 'new media' landscape as the US recently discovered it had. Many Australians get their news from one of two large companies (News Corp and Nine Entertainment). Those companies therefore still have massive influence over electorates and therefore over politicians.

From the 2 minute mark in this video explains some of the scheming that had been going on: https://twitter.com/ABCmediawatch/status/1860995847418474952

Watched video. The case is basically open and shut. This is why this ban came out of nowhere and why they hustled and sweated to get this of all things done in record time (for Australia).

Have to say, it is kind of genius of the legacy media and kind of chilling to see the naked face corruption like this.

One thing I don't understand: if you and other parents are so concerned about this... why let your children use those sites?

This feels equivalent to “if you don’t like smoking, just don’t smoke”.

Like I said in my original post I don’t think this stuff is specific to kids. I think social media has an equivalent to “second hand smoke” that poisons society whether or not we individually engage with it. And yes, classrooms are full of it.

You'd presumably advocate for banning it for everyone, then? If so, might I ask how you'd define 'social media'? Presumably Facebook counts. Does HN, or Discord?

No, I wouldn’t:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42266169

Oh good. I fully agree with that comment.

This describes the exact purpose of the law: to stop letting kids use those sites.

My very strict uncle was adamant that my cousins stay off Facebook when they were kids. They got on anyway. When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation. If he couldn't stop his kids from getting on, only the websites themselves can.

> My very strict uncle was adamant ... When he eventually found out, it was a bad situation.

These might be related. Of course kids will respond that way to severe strictness - it tends to happen with anything a parent acts that way about, whether it's social media, smoking, or simply hanging out with a particular group of people.

This is, still, the fault of the parent.

I'm assuming you don't have kids? It's impossible to stop them, both on a technical and social level. You'd guarantee a destroyed relationship with your kids if trying to do so without their consent.

I'd think forcing the kids to turn off the light at 11pm or eat fish or whatever is worse than dns blocking Facebook, from the kids perspective.

Peer pressure will cause many children banned from using social media to work around the ban.

> voters are genuinely concerned about the effect social media is having on kids.

But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?

Australian news is fairly concentrated and is mostly owned by one family. A family that got a law passed forcing only Google and Facebook to pay pretty much only them.

The conspiracy isn't that far fetched.

> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned? Is it the Australian news?

Their friends who have kids?

People still talk to other people.

> But where are they hearing about these effects that get them so concerned?

From real life? I know parents of middle school and up kids and they have first hand experience of the effects of social media and I’ve heard very little that’s positive.

I’m not saying the media aren’t trying to influence people but again, Occam’s razor: I really don’t think these parents need Rupert Murdoch whispering in their ear to be concerned about social media and kids.

Bad for business, and arguably, the world.

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