Australia, which passed a first-of-its-kind ban on social media for children under 16 in December, will soon require search engines to check the age of users before responding to their queries.
The new rules for mandatory age checks by search engines were introduced in June and will take effect in December. Companies like Google, the dominant search engine in Australia, will face fines of $50 million for failing to require age verification.
The regulations listed seven ways providers can verify the ages of search engine users, including photo ID, facial recognition, credit card numbers, digital ID cards, and the assurances of an Internet user’s parents that they are old enough.
The other two methods sound rather nebulous, given that $50 million fines are at stake: “using AI to guess a user’s age based on the data the company already has,” and “relying on a third party that has already checked the user’s age.”
Once the age of users has been verified, search providers will be required to filter pornography, violence, and other content from search results for users below the age of 18. Among the other objectionable content that must be filtered, according to Australia’s ABC News, is “material promoting eating disorders.”
ABC noted that unlike the ban on young social media users, which made big headlines in Australia and around the world, the search engine rules appear to have gone unnoticed, possibly because they were imposed through “the relatively dry world of regulation” rather than legislation.
Australian regulators will produce no less than nine codes regulating the Internet this year. The one that requires age verification for search engines was never properly announced to the public. ABC found out about it because eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant mentioned the rule in a speech to the National Press Club.
Internet rights advocates were appalled by this cavalier approach to serious freedom of information issues, particularly since the penalties for service providers are so steep.
“It’s not clear that there is a social license for such important and nuanced changes. We would argue that the public deserves more of a say in how to balance these important human rights issues,” Digital Rights Watch chair Lizzie O’Sheal told ABC.
Other critics doubted the age verification system would actually work. The ban on social media for children under 16 has already required field testing of age verification methods, and it has not gone well. Among other problems, tech-savvy youngsters are easily defeating the age-check gateways using virtual private networks (VPN) and other techniques pioneered by Internet users to evade censorship under authoritarian regimes like China.
“If the ambition of the government is to prevent children from accessing pornography, they’re forgetting straight away the skills of these young people,” observed John Pane, chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia.
RMIT University Professor of Information Sciences Lisa Given said Internet companies had some input into creating the “age assurance” system, which is probably one reason why so many different methods of verification have been proposed.
“So they certainly know this is coming, I expect that they are definitely going to comply. The question is which of these kinds of age-assurance mechanisms are they going to decide to choose,” she said.
Givens said search-engine users young and old have reason to be “very worried about their privacy.”
“We’re used to being able to go online and look for information anonymously. Many of us do log into search engine accounts, we have a Google account we use that so we can keep track of bookmarks and things,” she pointed out.
“But once people start having to prove their age… We know there are some flaws with things like age-assurance technologies, this is going to make people extremely nervous,” she said.
“Am I going to have to prove my age every time I log in? Is it going to be a one-off? Who is going to have the information about me?” she wondered, speculating that Australians might prefer the system to rely on government identification documents they already possess, such as drivers licenses.
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