Google age ID proposal may not suit Australia's under-16 social media ban, expert says
Google is considering allowing people to store and share identification documents such as their passport or driver's licence on their phone, as part of the Australian government's test of technologies to enforce the upcoming social media ban for under 16s.
But while the proposed system will likely offer benefits for adults who have access to identification, it will probably be less useful for identifying teenagers without ID documents, raising questions about how helpful the technology would be for the ban.
It is seven months until the social media ban for children under 16 is due to come into effect, but how it will work is still being determined.
A trial of the technology that could be used for checking user ages on social media apps will be completed in June. The communications minister is also expected to decide which social media platforms it will apply to in the near future.
Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email
Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), which is running the trial, did not publicise the progress of the trial during the course of the federal election campaign. However, this week the company released the minutes of a meeting held with stakeholders in March.
In the meeting, the Age Verification Providers Association executive director, Iain Corby, told the meeting that Google was 'considering' submitting a proposal to 'allow users to store an age credential in their Google Wallet and share it with apps and websites when needed'.
Separately, Google announced at the end of April that it would implement ID passes in Google Wallet in the UK – after already making it available in the US.
Under this system, users can take an issued ID such as a passport or licence, hold the information in the wallet, and share their date of birth with a website or app without sharing any other personal information.
In a website or app, it would offer a prompt similar to existing payment verification methods to allow users to share this information, and would use the existing authentication methods like passcode, fingerprint or facial recognition associated with phone-based payments.
Google also announced in February it was testing a 'machine learning-based age estimation model' to determine whether a user is under or over 18.
Google was approached for comment.
Apple announced similar technology in February, but the committee noted in its attempts to ask Apple about the technology, that the tech giant 'has been unresponsive, despite multiple outreach attempts'.
Dr Alexia Maddox, director of digital education at La Trobe University, said Google's proposal could be a 'fundamental misunderstanding' of the social media ban legislation. skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Breaking News Australia
Get the most important news as it breaks Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
'The bill aims to protect children under 16, but Google Wallet is primarily an adult-oriented service that most children don't have access to,' she said. 'This creates a paradoxical situation where the very users the legislation aims to identify and protect – children – would be unlikely to have the verification tool being proposed.'
Maddox warned against 'retrofitting an existing commercial product rather than developing a purpose-built solution for child protection'.
'For age verification to be effective and compliant with the bill's privacy protections, we need approaches that work for all age groups, preserve privacy, destroy data after verification, and don't further concentrate data in the hands of major tech platforms.'
Before the social media ban legislation passed in December, Meta and TikTok pushed the government to make Apple and Google, as the device makers, bear responsibility for age assurance, but the federal government decided the onus should rest on the app makers.
As part of the trial, more than 1,000 students across five states will participate in testing of at least 25 different age verification or assurance methods, with priority placed on facial age estimation technology.
The trial will test some ways children may try to get around the verification, the meeting heard.
Following the re-election of the Albanese government, consultation will also continue on which platforms the ban should apply to. Guardian Australia revealed last month the chief executive of YouTube personally lobbied the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, less than 48 hours before she announced YouTube would be exempt from the ban.
The news sparked fury from YouTube's rivals, Meta and TikTok, over what was deemed to be a 'sweetheart' deal for the platform.
During the election campaign, the federal infrastructure department, which is overseeing the consultation, wrote to Meta stating 'while the former minister for communications proposed to exclude YouTube, no legislative rules have been made giving effect to this'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
28 minutes ago
- Spectator
Is AI eating your brain?
Do you remember long division? I do, vaguely – I certainly remember mastering it at school: that weird little maths shelter you built, with numbers cowering inside like fairytale children, and a wolf-number at the door, trying to eat them (I had quite a vivid imagination as a child). Then came the carnage as the wolf got in – but also a sweet satisfaction at the end. The answer! You'd completed the task with nothing but your brain, a pen, and a scrap of paper. You'd thought your way through it. You'd done something, mentally. You were a clever boy. I suspect 80 to 90 per cent of universities will close within the next ten years Could I do long division now? Honestly, I doubt it. I've lost the knack. But it doesn't matter, because decades ago we outsourced and off-brained that job to machines – pocket calculators – and now virtually every human on earth carries a calculator in their pocket, via their phones. Consequently, we've all become slightly dumber, certainly less skilled, because the machines are doing all the skilful work of boring mathematics. Long division is, of course, just one example. The same has happened to spelling, navigation, translation, even the choosing of music. Slowly, silently, frog-boilingly, we are ceding whole provinces of our minds to the machine. What's more, if a new academic study is right, this is about to get scarily and dramatically worse (if it isn't already worsening), as the latest AI models – from clever Claude Opus 4 to genius Gemini 2.5 Pro – supersede us in all cerebral departments. The recent study was done by the MIT Media Lab. The boffins in Boston apparently strapped EEG caps to a group of students and set them a task: write short essays, some using their own brains, some using Google, and some with ChatGPT. The researchers then watched what happened to their neural activity. The results were quite shocking, though not entirely surprising: the more artificial intelligence you used, the more your actual intelligence sat down for a cuppa. Those who used no tools at all lit up the EEG: they were thinking. Those using Google sparkled somewhat less. And those relying on ChatGPT? Their brains dimmed and flickered like a guttering candle in a draughty church. It gets worse still. The ChatGPT group not only produced the dullest prose – safe, oddly samey, you know the score – but they couldn't even remember what they'd written. When asked to recall their essays minutes later, 78 per cent failed. Most depressingly of all, when you took ChatGPT away, their brain activity stayed low, like a child sulking after losing its iPad. The study calls this 'cognitive offloading', which sounds sensible and practical, like a power station with a backup. What it really means is: the more you let the machine think for you, the harder it becomes to think at all. And this ain't just theory. The dulling of the mind, the lessening need for us to learn and think, is already playing out in higher education. New York Magazine's Intelligencer recently spoke to students from Columbia, Stanford, and other colleges who now routinely offload their essays and assignments to ChatGPT. They do this because professors can no longer reliably detect AI-generated work; detection tools fail to spot the fakes most of the time. One professor is quoted thus: 'massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.' In the UK the situation's no better. A recent Guardian investigation revealed nearly 7,000 confirmed cases of AI-assisted cheating across British universities last year – more than double the previous year, and that's just the ones who got caught. One student admitted submitting an entire philosophy dissertation written by ChatGPT, then defending it in a viva without having read it. The result? Degrees are becoming meaningless, and the students themselves – bright, ambitious, intrinsically capable – are leaving education maybe less able than when they entered. The inevitable endpoint of all this, for universities, is not good. Indeed, it's terminal. Who is going to take on £80k of debt to spend three years asking AI to write essays that are then marked by overworked tutors using AI – so that no actual human does, or learns, anything? Who, in particular, is going to do this when AI means there aren't many jobs at the end, anyhow? I suspect 80 to 90 per cent of universities will close within the next ten years. The oldest and poshest might survive as finishing schools – expensive playgrounds where rich kids network and get laid. But almost no one will bother with that funny old 'education' thing – the way most people today don't bother to learn the viola, or Serbo-Croat, or Antarctic kayaking. Beyond education, the outlook is nearly as bad – and I very much include myself in that: my job, my profession, the writer. Here's a concrete example. Last week I was in the Faroe Islands, at a notorious 'beauty spot' called Trælanípa – the 'slave cliff'. It's a mighty rocky precipice at the southern end of a frigid lake, where it meets the sea. The cliff is so-called because this is the place where Vikings ritually hurled unwanted slaves to their grisly deaths. Appalled and fascinated, I realised I didn't know much about slavery in Viking societies. It's been largely romanticised away, as we idealise the noble, wandering Norsemen with their rugged individualism. Knowing they had slaves to wash their undercrackers rather spoils the myth. So I asked Claude Opus 4 to write me a 10,000-word essay on 'the history, culture and impact of slavery in Viking society.' The result – five minutes later – was not far short of gobsmacking. Claude chose an elegant title ('Chains of the North Wind'), then launched into a stylish, detailed, citation-rich essay. If I had stumbled on it in a library or online, I would have presumed it was the product of a top professional historian, in full command of the facts, taking a week or two to write. But it was written by AI. In about the time it will take you to read this piece. This means most historians are doomed (like most writers). This means no one will bother learning history in order to write history. This means we all get dumber, just as the boffins in Boston are predicting. I'd love to end on a happy note. But I'm sorry, I'm now so dim I can't think of one. So instead, I'm going to get ChatGPT to fact-check this article – as I head to the pub.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Australians can look forward to a bigger nest egg as super guarantee rises to 12%
Australian workers can look forward to a bigger nest egg, with an increase to the superannuation guarantee to add tens of thousands of dollars to the average super account. From 1 July, employers' minimum required contribution to employees' superannuation accounts will rise from 11.5% to 12%. It is the latest and last in a series of incremental increases from 9% over more than a decade since they were legislated by the Rudd-Gillard Labor government in 2012. With the latest bump, a 30-year-old earning $60,000 would have an extra $20,000 in super by retirement, according to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia. It will add about $300 each year to the superannuation of a worker on a $60,000 salary, or $500 for someone on a $100,000 salary. 'The system foundations are cemented for young, working people to have a comfortable retirement,' the ASFA chief executive, Mary Delahunty, said. 'It's a moment all Australians should be proud of.' Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email The association said the cost of a comfortable retirement had increased 1.6% in the past year, while the cost of a modest retirement rose 1.7%. A 'comfortable' retirement includes top-level health insurance, a reasonable car and leisure activities. The cost of either outcome was increasing slower than Australia's current 2.4% headline inflation but retiree budgets remained under pressure from rising food, energy and health costs. Couples on average need $73,900 annually for a comfortable retirement, while most singles require $52,300 a year, ASFA says. For a modest retirement covering the basics, couples needed $48,200 each year, singles $33,400, or for renting couples, $64,250, and $46,660 each year for singles who rent. The figures underlined the importance of increasing Australia's housing stock, Delahunty said. 'They also illustrate how super can be the difference between hardship and stability later in life, especially for renters.' For some workers, the extra contribution would come from their existing pay package, according to CPA Australia's superannuation lead, Richard Webb. 'It's a good idea to check with your employer to see how they view the changes and what it means for you,' he said. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Workers on contracts with a total remuneration package could see a slight drop in their take-home pay, while those on award or enterprise agreements would likely receive the contribution on top of their current pay. When compulsory superannuation was introduced in 1992 – in part to reduce government spending on the age pension – only one in 10 Australian retirees listed super as a source of income. Nine in 10 people between 30 and 50 now have super. Government spending on the age pension was projected to fall from 2.3% of gross domestic product in 2020 to 2.0% by 2062-63, despite a doubling of the over-65 population and a trebling of over-85s over the same period. However, the super guarantee increase would not help those who missed out on paid work for extended periods, the Super Consumers Australia chief executive, Xavier O'Halloran, said. '(For) people who have caring responsibilities or who have been locked out of the unaffordable housing market … increasing SG further won't address those inequalities,' he said. O'Halloran said there was more that could be done to support people struggling in retirement, when a significant portion of their autumnal years' savings were made. 'Right now, there are no minimum standards for retirement products like there are for MySuper,' he said. 'There is also no performance testing of retirement products, so super funds can still sell poor products.'
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Pornhub and other adult sites back online in France after three-week protest
Major adult websites Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube were back online in France Friday after a court suspended a decision requiring pornographic platforms based in the European Union to verify users' ages. The three platforms' owner, Aylo, based in Cyprus, had made its websites unavailable in France in early June as a protest against the French decree. Failure to comply could have lead to sanctions including fines or the blocking of the websites. France has gradually introduced requirements this year for all adult websites to have users confirm their age with details such as a credit card or ID document. The aim is to prevent minors from accessing pornography. But the Paris administrative tribunal on Monday suspended a government decree while investigating whether it was compatible with EU legislation. The French government has shared its intention to appeal to the Council of State, the country's highest administrative court. Aylo said the decree's suspension was an 'opportunity to reconsider more efficient approaches' to age verification. The company argued that this was an ineffective mechanism that exposed people's data to bad actors, hacks or leaks. 'Requiring you to repeatedly provide sensitive personal information creates an unacceptable security risk that we refuse to impose on our users,' the company said in a message displayed on the sites' homepages earlier this month. About 40% of children in France access porn sites every month, according to a 2024 study by France's Arcom audiovisual watchdog. In a bid to preserve privacy, the government decree also required operators to offer a third-party 'double-blind' option that would prevent the platforms from seeing users' identifying information. Aylo, which reports seven million visitors in France daily across its various platforms, has called instead for governments to require makers of operating systems such as Apple, Microsoft and Google to verify users' ages at the level of individual devices. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion The platform also argues that the French law 'diverts users to thousands of sites that deliberately circumvent regulations' and fails to moderate videos for issues such as the age and consent of performers. Other countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany also enforce age-related access restrictions to adult websites.
