Google will soon ask Australian users to show ID to view some content

https://reclaimthenet.org/google-will-soon-ask-australian-users-to-show-id-to-view-some-content/

by dannywarner • 4 years ago

202 204 4 years ago

Although the title is correct, it's worth noting that Google is not doing this because it thinks it's fun to require verification. The Australian government is requiring google to take this action.

jaquer_1• 4 years ago

Google is taking part, end of story.

karpierz2• 4 years ago

Headline: Google follows local laws.

Alternate-universe headline: Google uses monopolistic power to ignore government regulation for profit.

Which do you prefer?

johannes1234321• 4 years ago

Google creating attention probably is best that short befor an election.

LewisVerstappen• 4 years ago

"If our systems are unable to establish that a viewer is above the age of 18, we will request that they provide a valid ID or credit card to verify their age.”

I don't think Google is complaining too much. Especially if it gives them an excuse to collect credit card data (reducing a significant amount of friction when they sell YouTube premium / google drive subscriptions).

whimsicalism• 4 years ago

Not sure how you concluded that from this quote

lern_too_spel3• 4 years ago

Google could have required people to enter credit card details to download apps at all on their phones, following the precedent Apple had already set. That hasn't happened.

cmckn• 4 years ago

Does google actually save this payment information for use in subsequent transactions? Or is it just used as part of the age verification process?

bushbaba• 4 years ago

Also lets them easily join in credit card purchases to user info.

jimmaswell• 4 years ago

I had no idea you could actually use a credit card to verify age. I thought that was nothing but a scam employed by fraudulent cam/hookup sites and catfishers. Google probably shouldn't train people that this is a normal thing to do.

MomoXenosaga• 4 years ago

The credit-card as a viable ID is hilarious. I don't have a CC nor do I want one. So I just used someone else's so that Google doesn't bitch when I want to watch an 18 plus video.

I do have a passport that everyone is legally required to have in this country but trying to upload a picture of that was a fucking nightmare so I said fuck it take these numbers you clowns. Now if I can do this I'm sure every kid on the planet can just take their mom's CC so what is the point of this law anyway?

BiteCode_dev4• 4 years ago

Which is not a good proof. You can use one from somebody else, it doesn't prove that it's yours. Only that you have access to it. As long as you don't make any paiement, I suppose you will be fine.

nojs• 4 years ago

Ok, so what’s the real reason the government wants this?

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS2• 4 years ago

Well, the Australian government has shown it's willing to throw people into camps against their will, so...greater control of the population would be my guess.

You know. To keep kids safe.

RobertMiller5• 4 years ago

The "Five Eyes" anglosphere establishment uses Australia as a testbed for authoritarian measures that may later be implemented in the others.

aaa_aaa• 4 years ago

For the greater good. </s>

wutbrodo2• 4 years ago

The ~only reason gov't ever does anything is because they think it looks good to voters.

And any given voter doesn't have "wants" or "beliefs", just violent mood swings and social performance.

This isn't really even a bug of government's! Government action is very often valuable and necessary. But the incentive structure is such that modeling the gov't as a somewhat-rational entity with well-formed desires is usually not the correct frame to start with, IMO

stubish5• 4 years ago

The Australian Government wants social media to be able to identify users who make posts so they can be sued for defamation. Age verification is just an easy to accept start, getting people on board and setting the legal precedent of requiring foreign owned social media companies to collect this private and dangerous information (and note, Australia is also suing these same companies for abusing private information they collect). Assuming the opposition goes along for the ride, identity verification will also kick in before making Youtube comments, Facebook posts or comments, or Tweets. And maybe Mozilla will make some money marketing their VPN as a privacy service for Australians.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-28/social-media-laws-onl...

Siira• 4 years ago

Perhaps there is some Chinese influence in this governmental decision, as well. They benefit from normalizing oppression.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

China and Australia are very close.

China is Australia's largest two-way trading partner in goods and services, accounting for nearly one third (31 per cent) of our trade with the world.

https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/china/china-country-brief

The CCP is evil.

superkuh• 4 years ago

That's interesting. Is the Australian government requiring me (superkuh) to take action to follow their absurd laws for my dot com website too? I definitely have Australian users.

I guess what I'm asking is if this is something Google is doing pro-actively to cover their asses after a general law was passed, or if the Australian government has explicitly contacted Google (alphabet) about this?

stubish5• 4 years ago

The Australian Government is only targeting big social media. They are requiring big social media to be able to identify users so they may be prosecuted for defamation. They and the courts don't care about sites that an insignificant number of people follow (yet). Age verification on Google is just the start. Soon you won't be able to use Twitter, Facebook or comments sections on Australian news sites without sending them ID or using a VPN. Tumbler, Pinterest and hacker news have not yet been targeted.

moltke• 4 years ago

The incentives of the two organizations are aligned. It makes sense and is very unfortunate that they capitulate so easily. It's yet another example of why you shouldn't rely on anything from Google.

batch12• 4 years ago

I am curious if the ID will be validated somehow or just dates checked. If the former, I wonder of this endpoint would be given to any site owner to validate age. If the latter, I can imagine someone creating a "this ID does not exist" service to fill this need. More likely VPN providers are about to get a bump in clientele.

bl4ckneon• 4 years ago

It would probably be an automatic system somehow just looking at the dates. Imagine someone wanting to watch a video and then submitting their ID and getting the message back "thank you, you will be able to access this content in a few hours once we have verified your ID".

You would have just lost that person for a long time.

codedokode2• 4 years ago

In theory, IDs can be verified against government-owned database. That's how online ID verification for payment systems works in Russia.

dannywarner• 4 years ago

The Australian government made a big push to make Google and Facebook pay Australian news sites for links to content on their platforms.

Google made a number of moves to head that off, including pumping money into local initiatives and a deal with the local media companies.

Not fighting back hard against the current social conservative government's moves on censorship and cracking down on online rights is consistent with Google's other moves to protect profits and avoid paying media companies for links.

pkaye• 4 years ago

Maybe they saw it was inevitable since the EU is already doing this. Maybe a majority the citizen of these countries are okay with the tradeoffs.

proactivesvcs• 4 years ago

Ironic headline for a site which immediately throws up a full-page interstitial asking for my email address.

nmilo• 4 years ago

How is that ironic?

reaperducer2• 4 years ago

The same way "rain on your wedding day" is ironic.

It's not.

jjice• 4 years ago

Email and government ID are very different, and the headline isn't coming off as a hit piece, so I don't think this is ironic.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Yeah that pattern makes me think "this is spam"

josephcsible• 4 years ago

Will Google in Australia have a button that lets you skip the identification process but see the content anyway? No, so those aren't even remotely similar.

BigJono2• 4 years ago

So are all the Fox News idiots that wanted to come and liberate us from authoritarianism going to do it already? Or is that just for liberal state governments with barely any power that don't share your political views?

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS2• 4 years ago

They're waiting for all the liberal actors to move home from Canada after Trump got elected.

extheat• 4 years ago

First step is to go after censorship

wutbrodo2• 4 years ago

Uh, in the eyes of a Fox News viewer, doesn't Australia count as "a liberal state government that doesn't share [their] political views"?

What does this comment even mean? It reads like GPT-1 spent too much time on /r/politics

BigJono2• 4 years ago

State as in not federal. Not state as in nation.

1/8th of the country takes a different approach to a public health crisis and suddenly every hot take American conservative talks about invading the country. But the federal government uses us as a testing ground for technological authoritarianism for the better part of a decade and it doesn't get reported at all, even within Australia, except for on tech sites and other left-leaning places.

If you, as an American, are worried about authoritarianism within your own country, stamping this steady ramping of it out in other allied western nations should be a key priority. But the only time I've ever heard an American news network even talk about Australia was about the Melbourne lockdowns, with completely incorrect facts everywhere, making an absolute mountain out of a molehill.

weq• 4 years ago

Fox Is pushing this agenda in Australia. Murdoch plays our governments like his private backgammon table. "Conversative Liberal" party in Australia = "Rust belt GOP" party in US

Australia is what happens when you sell off your land to the highest bidder, throw your consistution out the window and let the Capitalists take over.

simion3145• 4 years ago

We really need to have the OS and browser cooperate on this, otherwise we will need to show our ID to each website we visit. But browser makers are busy with chasing benchmarks or other less relevant stuff that are fun for devs to work on or that might make more money.

overboard2• 4 years ago

No, we don't need browsers cooperating with this.

simion3145• 4 years ago

Why? it would not be forced on you but think about this super easy scenario.

1 I buy a device for my child and I set it up and enter his birthday, say he is under 13

2 I buy me a device , setup my account and enter my credit card to use the Store , the OS now is 100% sure I am an adult

3 The browser on our devices knows our ages now

4 13+ , 18+ webpages will mark this in the header , the browser on the child phone knows to not just allow the child to click "I am 18+ old" , the browser on my device would check my settings and say if I am a religious guy I tell the browser not to show the pages to me.

5 if you can't or won't tell your OS or browser your age either send your ID card to all websites or don't go there, big websites will respect local laws so maybe you can have luck with a VPN or some small website that does not care about local laws in a different country.

I suggest this idea as an alternatives to having to send ID card copy to each websites, I am not advocating for UK or Australian laws to be made default everywhere.

kzrdude2• 4 years ago

Since EU already has this, it's been very few videos on yt where this has been asked. I just avoid them.

bleuchase• 4 years ago

Since EU already has this, it's been very few videos on yt where this has been asked. I just avoid them.

Do you think that may be part of the purpose of such a system?

kzrdude2• 4 years ago

Nope, it's an unintended consequence, I think the political motivation is naivistic. It turns into a kind of censorship, but was conceptualized as a speed bump.

ailef• 4 years ago

I've noticed the restriction on some YouTube video as well. With one account of mine I'm able to see them though, even if I don't remember giving my credit card details or ID. I created this account a long time ago so I might be wrong. I think they asked for my phone number for verification instead.

rabuse• 4 years ago

Almost every invasive thing in our lives is because of "think of the children".

inter_netuser• 4 years ago

somehow i don't think the invasive measures will go away with artificial placentas and factories that pop out healthy and ready 25-35 year old professionals/drones.

what will we think of then?

yakshaving_jgt• 4 years ago

…A very different approach to the dating scene?

dudul2• 4 years ago

You can sometimes substitute with "to fight terrorists" if you need to vary your discourse a bit.

gruez2• 4 years ago

Or more recently, "to fight anti-vaxxers"

vimda• 4 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...

dqpb• 4 years ago

The problem is that there are legitimate attack vectors on both sides of the freedom/control spectrum.

jmrm• 4 years ago

What kind of problem solves this measure? If someone think that minors won't access adult content that person is pretty naive. Only with TV shows, series, movies, music, and games they are going to watch a lot of violence and sex scenes, and most of us knows there are a lot of easy ways to access to this kind of content outside mass media.

Letting the usefulness of this measure aside, I think there should be other ways to get your age without using your ID, like using a credit card for example. I don't know if there is any way to get the age of a person using the credit card, to be honest, but at least is an identification method with a expiring date and possibilities to cancel in any moment, not a unique number you can't never change in your whole life (at least in most Western countries I know).

jlund-molfese2• 4 years ago

I don’t disagree with anything you said, but some countries, like the US, don’t have a national ID system. So we usually have the option of using one of several different ways to verify our identities[1] for commercial services. Unfortunately most still do give you fixed numbers that don’t change unless you move to another state.

1. https://help.id.me/hc/en-us/articles/360017833054

Broken_Hippo3• 4 years ago

but some countries, like the US, don’t have a national ID system

This is.. not quite true. Social security numbers are used this way (even if they aren't intended to be such a thing) and passports are essentially a national ID system. My passport is the only valid ID that I have - of course, I live outside the US and have to have the nearest US embassy renew it. (I don't qualify for Norwegian IDs yet, and my immigration card is a supplement to my passport instead of actual ID)

sharken• 4 years ago

It adds a layer of control which is very much the way legislation is going right now.

Gone are the days where parents could educate their children on how to behave on the net it seems.

We should not accept slogans such as "For the children", doing that leads to ever more restrictions and control.

I don't have any solution to turn the tide, other than making sure to vote for a party that supports freedom on the net.

perihelions• 4 years ago

This dovetails nicely with Google unilaterally deciding to age-restrict things like presidential candidate campaigns.

https://www.lefigaro.fr/medias/la-video-d-eric-zemmour-restr...

hanniabu• 4 years ago

Imo all ads should be age restricted

shadowgovt• 4 years ago

While it is unilateral, it appears that the triggering effect for the age restriction is the content of the video, not the fact that a politician put it up.

jdrc• 4 years ago

Age verification sounds like an application of zero-knowledge proofs

WinterMount2232• 4 years ago

Could you explain further?

iso12103• 4 years ago

Imagine you are visiting hacker news, and for some reason you have to prove your age, but you don't want HN to know who you are, nor your age identity site to know you're going to HN

One way to do this off the top mf my head would be

HN issues a unique number (say 4096 bit) to you when you create an account

You send that number to your identity provider along with confirming proof of age

The identity provider signs that the number is valid and posts it to a public source

HN downloads a list of 4096 bit numbers posted in the last 5 minutes and confirms the one associated with your account is on the list

HN will know that "Identities-r-us.com" has proven your age, but nothing else

IRU know you had to age approve a site, but there are many sites downloading the lists so they don't know which one

tootahe45• 4 years ago

They'll want to collect the data for themselves which is why we don't already see this for things like KYC.

manytree2• 4 years ago

Sounds like exact quandary that the emerging DID spec (Decentralized Identifiers) [https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/] is hoping to solve. I.e. you can submit your proof of age to an attestation service (in this case, perhaps the australian government itself) and receive an anonymous DID from which you can issue proofs of age without revealing other aspects of your identity.

tomjen3• 4 years ago

Would that also work the other way around? Ie would it mean the Australian government wouldn’t know anything other than you wanting to prove your age to somebody?

Otherwise it seems a terrible idea.

manytree2• 4 years ago

Yeah, the DID you receive from the attestation service can be used multiple times, and is assumed to be immutable, so you sign messages with your private key to prove ownership of the DID but generally reveal no other information. One concern would be that a backend integration might exist between the Australian government’s attestation service and Google’s system, in which case there might be benefit to the existence of an alternative public institution that is committed to privacy which has the demonstrated authority to verify age.

klabb3• 4 years ago

Yes, but I find this unlikely to be endorsed by governments in the short term.

It'd be great if the law said that it's (very) illegal for the verifying party to share or store any of the PII, including with the government.

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

For YouTube, that has been the case for a while in Germany. Certain videos (usually semi-pornographic, I think I only encountered it for black metal music videos) will require age verification. And that is despite my Google account being 18 years old…

numlock86• 4 years ago

Australian government forces Google to soon ask Australian users to show ID to view some content

There, I fixed it. I'm getting tired of every headline trying to bash on Google/Facebook/etc. for clicks.

Ansil849• 4 years ago

Do you also have this same opinion on Google's Project Dragonfly (Google's censored Chinese search engine)? That is, that people shouldn't have "bashed" Google, since it was the Chinese government "forcing" them?

DaltonCoffee2• 4 years ago

Needing gov't ID to follow search links is dystopian, and antithetical to the original spirit of the Internet.

Google should flat out refuse when governments make these requests.

mechanical_bear3• 4 years ago

Agreed, and not sure why the early downvote wave you experienced there. I am surprised to see this sort of sentiment downvoted on HN.

tzs• 4 years ago

It looks like it is for YouTube and Play content, not search links.

If so, I don't see how it is any more dystopian than the ID requirements that have long been in place for non-internet media. I don't recall anyone calling it dystopian back in the '70s for instance when we had to show ID to rent movies from the "adult" room at the local video rental store.

coolso• 4 years ago

Kind of a bad look for Google when its workers refuse to work on projects for the US Military, and then when Trump wins they hold a meeting where top level execs are tearing up and emotional while unpacking the situation… but when things like this happen, seemingly, nothing but crickets from those brave workers.

Tired of people defending Google at every turn despite them not deserving the benefit of the doubt for many years now.

OrlandoHakim• 4 years ago

Google has a choice here. Just as they chose to not to do business in China.

I find it disingenuous to claim that one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world has no agency in this situation.

Remember how hard Google fought the Australian laws about search engines paying news organizations.

Not to say the Australian government is guilt-free here. There are no good guys here.

tehwebguy• 4 years ago

Nobody misunderstood headline this as it was written

dessant3• 4 years ago

Age verification is already mandated in the EU, and when you provide your credit card details to Google's age verification system for YouTube, they create a payments profile for you without consent. The Google account is set up for purchasing services across all Google properties, without needing to provide further payment details.

Google is exploiting the requirement for age verification to set up Google accounts for future purchases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30699957

jmole• 4 years ago

Or, they’re using the only consumer-focused credit card verification system they have (google pay), and “prevent users from using their credit cards” was never on the roadmap…

MereInterest2• 4 years ago

Isn't that a pretty straightforward violation of the GDPR? Consent to track somebody's personal information requires the data subject to be informed as to the use of the information, and personal information may not be used outside of the usages that were consented to.

sreevisakh3• 4 years ago

Google's use of payment profiles is much more nefarious and exploitative. I recently moved from one country to another. There are a lot of apps that provide local services - like banking and public transport information. I wasn't able to install any of them. Why? My original profile is from the country of my previous residence, where I originally bought my phone. None of those apps should be geographically restricted in the first place - but they are, for some unexplained reason. I have found apps that are geographically restricted even without the knowledge of the developer.

So then, how do you prove that you are in a different country? Easy, right? There are multiple sources of information that can prove your location - GPS, mobile service provider information, IP geo-location, Wifi SSID databases... . But no - none of that is enough. You have to add a local payment method! And coincidentally none of the payment methods other than credit card information works - not even the one provided by mobile service provider. So, you are forced to register your credit card information to prove your location.

Now that your have proved your location and installed the essential apps you need, may be it's time to delete the credit card information. What if you accidentally subscribe to some service you didn't want? After all, you aren't subscribed to any service or bought anything with the newly entered card. So it should be easy to delete it, right? NO! You are not allowed to delete your only registered payment method! [1] Now it's open forever as a payment method for online services or Google pay.

Google's tactics here are sleazy, underhanded and manipulative. And what of the complaints they receive about it? See for yourself - discussion locked and disabled! I don't know at what point their behavior is declared illegal and anti-social.

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/10797082?hl=en&...

markdown• 4 years ago

they create a payments profile for you without consent.

And? I create a "profile" in my mind of every new human I interact with, and every human I read about or hear about even without interacting with. It's a basic human function.

When I gain a new business client, I create a profile of them too. This might start with a phone number, but over time, expand to include an email address, knowledge about their location, work hours, bank of choice, etc. Most businesses do this and always have.

Consent isn't required for this.

BiteCode_dev4• 4 years ago

They do also other things like that:

- logging to gmail on a non logged in android ? This logs the entire phone to the accounts

- chrome and online google services account are intertwined

Semaphor2• 4 years ago

I find it somewhat hilarious that a site "reclaim the net – Push back against online censorship, cancel culture, and privacy invasion. Informed by principles on digital rights" wants me to give them my email for their newsletter on my very first visit. Before showing me the article, or anything.

Yes, I would like to reclaim the net. From sites such as that one.

dimitrios12• 4 years ago

I used to believe, at least in the early days, that these tech companies were successful in upholding the values of freedom of expression, speech, and exchange of information, subsequently the values that the early internet itself formed around. They were anti-authoritarian.

Now it seems they willingly accept being pushed around, succumb to any request to compromise its values in the interest of shareholder value, and willingly collude with authoritarian requests from governments.

It's all so typical, in a way. Whatever shred of idealism I had left for these companies is now completely gone.

ludamad• 4 years ago

The problem is that the more a company wants to draw a line in the sand against a government, the more it must be a monopoly of some kind otherwise be replaced by someone who doesn't

dimitrios12• 4 years ago

I find the reverse to be true. It is only when a company becomes a monopoly does it begin acting in this way. It becomes hellbent on maintaining that monopoly.

moonshinefe• 4 years ago

Governments all over the world have started pushing for ways to collect ID on social media users, often under the guise of providing a safe space for kids online.

Does anyone know how these work on a technical level? Are they actually verifying these IDs with some sort of government API? What's preventing people from just sending fake IDs?

I'm also curious how non-tech giants are going to implement this. It's a big ask for small websites run by single or small groups of people. If they face consequences too, it seems like a win for the social media sites to keep their market positions.

Finally, what's preventing the children from just using non-tech giant sites to get at adult content? If it's literally just for Facebook, Youtube and the like, it'll be about as useless as the "Click here to confirm you're 18+!" verifications since they'll just search elsewhere, on one of the millions of other adult content sites...

zo13• 4 years ago

One would imagine, but the state of "KYC" in the wild is much less pretty. Some governments don't even have a national identity card (USA, UK) to verify. So instead they verify driver's licenses, passports, utility bills. Others use credit agencies, half-baked and built-up-over-time databases of who knows what, facial recognition, etc. Kicker, most border control checks are no more advanced than looking up a traveler's name surname and date of birth in old lists.

XorNot• 4 years ago

Welp time to re-up a mulvad subscription I guess. The Australian government has been embracing cronyism and corruption for a while, but until half the country stops rewarding the incumbent party with votes while complaining about everything they do because "the other guys will be worse" then here we are.

stavros• 4 years ago

Don't they already? I've been asked for a credit card or ID to watch certain YouTube videos, and I'm not even in Australia.

Strom• 4 years ago

Yes this same system is already enforced for Europeans and has been since 2020.

lelandfe• 4 years ago

Important to note that YouTube added this in the EU back in 2020: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/using-technology-more-c...

codedokode2• 4 years ago

Regarding adult content, don't you think that there is a better solution? Websites could add a HTTP header containing content rating; if the header is missing then it is considered 18+ content. Browsers use this header to restrict access according to OS settings.

This way the problem can be solved without any IDs and credit cards.

Also I don't understand why age verification is needed for Google Play. Isn't adult content already banned there?

EastSmith• 4 years ago

Is there a KYC service where I can proof I am 18+, without actually revealing my information to Google, Facebook, etc.

Will Google and Facebook support it unless required by law?

BLKNSLVR• 4 years ago

Semi-ironically, the site pops up a full screen "subscribe with email address" window upon loading.

There's an easily visible link to close it without subscribing but fuck it's tone deaf for a site called "reclaim the internet".

monkeydreams• 4 years ago

Given that both major parties in Australia have a bad history of bad tech law, I'm not hopeful that even the upcoming election would get in the way of this one.

stubish5• 4 years ago

I think this is more about getting people on board with requiring social media to be able to identify users, which is also happening. People hate having to provide ID to Facebook so that they can be identified when the law asks, and the chilling effects of de-anonymization. But stopping kids viewing decapitation videos, sure.

Google will soon ask Australian users to show ID to view some content

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