Age checks to become mandatory for online search engines in Australia

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The rules around age verification were passed by the government in a bid to limit harmful online content, though experts have questioned how effective the measures will be. Information Sciences Professor, Lisa Given, says it will be no surprise if people find ways around the restrictions.

Transcript

00:00You know, upload another piece of ID or some other verification mechanism.

00:06Lisa, in your vast experience of researching all things like this, how much will it actually

00:11do to protect young people online?

00:15I think it serves as a bit of a gatekeeping function, but at the end of the day, where

00:19there's a will, there's a way.

00:21People can definitely still access this content by not logging into an account.

00:25They could also use a VPN to get around it by pretending to not be in Australia, for

00:30example.

00:31And of course, in many people's homes, there's often like a family account where people might

00:36have a shared laptop logged in all the time.

00:39Parents are going to have to be very careful to ensure that they are logged out of an adult

00:43account in order for these kind of controls to be appropriately in place.

00:48Yeah, so many intricacies.

00:50Do you think other parts of the internet could follow suit?

00:53It's very interesting.

00:54I mean, we've been talking about it for some time with social media platforms.

00:58We're now seeing this with search engines.

01:00There are other codes, I understand, that are still under development by the government.

01:04So we will see what else is going to come forward in the coming months.

01:08But I think there's certainly this drive towards age assurance.

01:11That's something that's being looked at globally.

01:13And Australia is very much under the watchful eye of other countries as we start to enact these

01:18controls.

01:19Which was going to be my next question.

01:21Is Australia unique in this?

01:22Are we the only country that's doing it?

01:25This is a first as far as I'm aware.

01:27And this really kind of popped up very quickly.

01:29Many experts, we were not aware that this was coming into play.

01:34There are other countries like the UK, New Zealand.

01:37Others have been watching the social media ban and requirements around age assurance.

01:42So I think we're going to see increasingly different governments starting to look at this.

01:46Professor Lisa Given, thank you so much.

01:49My pleasure.

01:49Thanks, Lorna.

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