Australia is introducing age checks for search engines like Google

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-search-engines/105516256

by ahonhn • 1 year ago

122 114 1 year ago

abc.net.au

jimbob45• 1 year ago

Why not simply pass a law to limit company liability in the case that a minor sees something undesirable? Why shouldn’t the onus be on the parents to parent?

hedora2• 1 year ago

All of these laws (the US has some now) are designed to set up a censorship regime that can control speech or oppress undesirable groups (Project 2025 calls out LGBTQ+, for example).

The age verification also will inevitably let the authorities create a list of adults to persecute.

vkou• 1 year ago

The age verification also will inevitably let the authorities create a list of adults to persecute.

If your government has slid that far down the dystopian shithole scale, why would they care if the person they are persecuting is an adult or a child?

rogerrogerr• 1 year ago

The general trend is not toward _more_ parental autonomy; it’s towards kids being property of the government and parents serving as keepers at the government’s pleasure.

numpad0• 1 year ago

Because it's not about minors or pornography at all. It's about ending online anonymity, democracy enabled by the Internet, and ultimately to pick out dissidents to eventually disappear them.

budududuroiu• 1 year ago

If Australia genuinely wanted to improve the lives of its children, it would first tackle the loopholes in its child support scheme [1].

But then again, as with Chat Control and other such schemes, “save the children” is used to usher in breaking of all citizens’ privacy. I bet Aus is insanely jealous of China’s mandatory ID checks on their superapps

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/08/single-paren...

chii• 1 year ago

Whenever a measure is instroduced in law to austensibly "protect the children", it's just merely an appeal to emotion and in fact, is not meant to do what is being advertised.

It certainly is meant to increase the power of law enforcement, gov't overreach, and intrusion. It is used to add a chilling effect on any sort of dissent.

The same could be said for any measures to protect you from "the terrorists".

johnisgood• 1 year ago

Yeah, it has never been about saving the children, or fight terrorism. It has been about control and power. People should read more about Austrian economics / Mises, because despite what their preconceived thoughts may suggest, everyone who thinks this is a bad idea, will like what they will read on Mises' website.

Books like "Anatomy of the State" by Rothbard, "Basic Economics" by Sowell, "The Left, The Right, & The State" by L. H. Rockwell, Jr. or "Lessons for the Young Economist" by Bob Murphy are quite nice. Heck, I would even suggest "The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat.

You do not have to read books however, you can check blog posts.

Website can be found here: https://mises.org. You are looking for "Wire" and "Beginners". Make sure to use the search functionality though, there are a lot of very specific subjects that are "irrelevant" to this case.

BLKNSLVR5• 1 year ago

I was having a similar conversation yesterday, and my stance is that the political grand-standing like this is worse than doing nothing because it gives the populace the sense that something is being done, although very little is likely to change. Resources are being applied far from optimally. Funding that could be useful is being spent on the useless. As such, it's taking things in the wrong direction whilst still costing more than what previously existed and also impinging on other areas of literally everyone else's lives.

I believe that acting locally, funding child protection services, providing more boots on the ground, is actual progress (I mean, these organisations are literally called "child protection services", who else better, then?)

I've mentioned this a number of times before: my wife is a teacher and therefore has 'mandatory reporting' responsibilities. The frustration is that, with the resources currently available, they're only able to intervene where a child's life is in immediate danger.

I'm not sure if the bar could be any lower.

I should also make the disclaimer that what I know is second-hand information from my wife, and may be out of date and / or biased due to frustrations due to the misalignment between 'mandatory reporting' and 'what can actually be done'.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

my stance is that the political grand-standing like this is worse than doing nothing because it gives the populace the sense that something is being done, although very little is likely to change.

I mostly agree with this. Unfortunately I think it is also true of a lot of activist tactics (e.g., big protests), which seem to be more about making their participants feel good than about producing genuine results. It's human nature to lose interest in things when there is no crisis, and to be vulnerable to misdirection.

It's like the old joke about how there's no good time to fix the roof, because when it's raining you can't fix it, and when it's not raining you don't need to fix it. Of course, you have to fix it when it's not raining. Likewise the only real way to avoid this "sense of something being done" is to push sizable changes at a moment when no one thinks they are urgent, and that's often difficult to accomplish.

SXX• 1 year ago

Well, childcare is easy to measure. It's easy to see whatever it sufficient or not so it's a bad topic for politicians.

But you can “save the children” as many times as you want and there will always be another thing to save them from. And it's impossible to measure because obviously you can't go and ask children what they do on internet or what inappropriate content they found intentionally or not.

So perfect topic to work with even without conspiracy to invade grown ups privacy.

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

Big Mother is here to collect your metadata, sell it to data brokers, and put its opponents on watchlists.

ghssds• 1 year ago

What about Yandex? If I wanted to see porn, I'd go to Yandex, not Bing or Google, because Yandex is the superior search engine for that kind of thing. If Yandex is unaffected, this age check is useless.

What about Marginalia? A small operation like Marginalia, if affected, may not have the ressource to implement age check. Is this some kind of regulation capture scheme?

Why don't you just shove a leash up my ass?

BLKNSLVR5• 1 year ago

Devil's advocate position:

If you can shepherd the majority, or at least a larger percentage, then the leaks can be ignored (until they get too big, at which time then consider changes and tweaks).

For the likes of us on HN bypassing these things is a bodily function, however I believe there's a large cohort "out there" for whom it could be a bridge too far. Eg. I doubt too many degrees of separation outside of HN even know of the existence of Marginalia.

Having said that, the existence and purpose of a VPN is probably pretty well spread "out there in the world".

(ignoring the effectiveness of the topic of this thread).

Barbing• 1 year ago

I immediately felt this to be a gift to Yandex.

Kid searches for porn and can’t find it. Someone at school recommends incognito/logging out. … So they lock down logged out searches?

Next someone at school puts them onto SearXNG, Yandex, VPNs, etc.

Maybe a percentage of kids will grow up never learning workarounds? Maybe the rest get slightly more tech savvy in a good way… (I’m not pro-11-year-olds watching ultra-depraved snuff but can see occasional bridges to IT know-how. Hope not all workarounds are ultra-appified then.)

LAC-Tech2• 1 year ago

Yandex is goated for stuff US companies and their "partners" don't want to show you search results for, esp WRT politics and world events,

I assume that Russian dissidents must ironically use google et al for the same reasons.

rpdillon• 1 year ago

Thanks for the Demolition Man reference. Great movie, and apt!

simmo90003• 1 year ago

1788-2025 and still going strong...

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

The sense of impotence in the comments is palpable.

What can we - the people - do to make our discontent heard?

simmo90003• 1 year ago

Australia has "the vote" for that.

bigger_cheese• 1 year ago

In my opinion the most likely way it gets torpedoed is by Trump threatening the Aus Gov over trying to regulate US Tech companies.

Feels like Albanese is walking on eggshells at the moment trying to get Trump not to cancel AUKUS, not ramp up tarrifs etc.

theshackleford2• 1 year ago

The majority of the Australian population would agree with the introduction of such laws. It is the minority (such as those of us here) who disagree. So the people have been "heard" and they are getting what they want. It's the rest of us who suffer.

jim-jim-jim• 1 year ago

Is that true? It seems like this was more of a complete non-issue in the last election, suddenly implemented once Labor secured power again. I'm not saying your hypothetical popular support is unrealistic, but I don't think anybody actively voted for this.

Living in Australia has been eye opening. I naïvely assumed that mandatory, ranked-choice voting would draw a direct line from popular sentiment to legislative outcome, but that's anything but the case.

Traubenfuchs• 1 year ago

Theoretically: Vote for parties that are not actively hostile towards the people.

Practically: nothing.

Democracy has largely failed and in many countries you can, at best, pick between right wing assholes that work against your best interests and leftwing idiots that work against your best interests.

worthless-trash2• 1 year ago

Which party is that ? Because I'm not seeing one.

dav43• 1 year ago

Australian politics is very much in favour of throwing around a lot of Red herrings. Eg get the conversation, media and public focussed on unimportant issues as a way to distract from the fact they are incompetent to deal with big issues.

Grew up in NSW for 25 years. Nothing has changed. A few extra toll roads.

dottjt2• 1 year ago

I would refrain from referring to it as incompetence, as I feel that ignores the true nature of the system.

The problem is that the Australian political system needs to appease to the centre. That's how parties get into power. As long as that's the case, it doesn't leave a whole lot of room to meaningfully tackle the problems plaguing the country (in particular, housing).

axolttl88• 1 year ago

Your point about not tackling the hardest challenges is well made. However the benefit of needing to appeal to the political Centre (a factor of compulsory voting) is that Australia also avoids the crazy swings and debilitating division of left and right that other nations can face.

RpFLCL• 1 year ago

I think it's telling that this is happening via "policies" instead of laws, because almost nobody cares or wants it.

It's also telling that Google and Microsoft aren't in opposition to this new burden, they're giving quiet yet full support. This will *necessarily* entrench the big players through the burden to implement, make it easier to track individuals across different accounts and services, and endanger the privacy and anonymity of all adults in Australia. And I think that's all the goal.

If they cared about protecting kids they'd focus on resources and campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls. Then parents could decide if they care to block these things in their homes. It should be up to them.

The "you can just log out" loophole, that's just boiling the frog slowly. It would be foolish to think that will stay around.

heavyset_go7• 1 year ago

Google et al want it because it finally gives them a way to wall off AI scraping and prove their usage/impression/etc statistics reflect human beings.

It's also clear that this data itself is valuable in the first place, and any company ever would love to be handed it for free mandated by law.

exodust4• 1 year ago

campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls.

Exactly this.

The other possibility is that Google & Microsoft won't want to hassle people for ID or "papers please" just for liking a post, reviewing a business or sending email.

If I were Google, I'd be worried about losing a LOT of customers who simply won't provide invasive personal details which routinely get stolen in Australia from poorly secured "trusted" organisations like Qantas and Optus.

People won't want to send their ID to "trusted ID contractors" for simple web services because e-Karen has a final solution. I'll close my Google accounts if they ever deny me access on that basis, and I'll take action against the measures in any way I can to make things as uncomfortable as possible for whatever authoritarian government ushers this garbage in.

senectus1• 1 year ago

By the time they get this bullshit up and running my kids will be old enough to no be kids anymore.

but regardless I will absolutely be implementing a VPN solution to bypass this.

ggm• 1 year ago

In full expectation of being downvoted, I would like to say here that I think the comments below show an astonishing lack of awareness about how most ordinary australians feel about the risks to children online. I believe most australians vox-popped in the street would say they expect the government to do this.

I'm not for a minute saying either the current government, or any past government is either competent or capable of implementing protections which actually work. I am solely saying, these intentions will probably be popular with a lot of parents, and very possibly electorally popular as well, and will be unopposed by the opposition, unless they take a "not going far enough" position.

The Australian Privacy Commissioner, and the CSIRO made substantive submissions to the government regarding use of trusted third parties and homomorphic encryption. I have some doubt the government is interested in listening, but the fact remains there are technologies which can identify you, do KYC 100 points, and not reveal who you are, or where you are going, to the government who issues the ID.

Like many others I've had my google account in continuous use, demonstrated to google through use of things like passkeys and 2FA, for over 20 years. I struggle to think of how most people with a gmail account have not functionally identified themselves to google (most: by no means all)

trollbridge2• 1 year ago

I agree, and most the comments here also show a lack of awareness of how much parents really don't want their kids running across Andrew Tate-esque material online and think it's okay for the government to regulate things in some way so that kids don't just accidentally run across that.

And yes, I think barely anyone exists who hasn't functionally identified themselves to Google. And I'd venture nobody exists where Google hasn't already built a shadow profile on them (for ad networks); how exactly do people think they've been using Google for "free" all these years?

Nasrudith• 1 year ago

They are aware - they just believe in things like fundamental human rights which make what those idiots want matter about as much as the price of tea in China.

And good grief the lack of understanding of the basics of consent is downright appalling! It is literally the same logic as a rapist's defense that their victim was promiscuous so they couldn't have been raped!

__d2• 1 year ago

Anyone who cares will ask their mates at school, who will assist them to set up a VPN and thus circumvent this silliness. Then the same people who've pushed this solution to their perceived problem will start to target VPNs.

The real question is whether they then attempt to ban VPNs. The streamers would likely join in on that, which might be sufficient lobbying for the government to accept it?

Fortunately, my 12yo was born on 1 Jan 1970, just like their parents.

NoPicklez2• 1 year ago

This isn't just asking for your age, its going to require verification of that through ID.

__d2• 1 year ago

There appears to be a variety of mechanisms proposed. I assume some of them, at least, will be able to be fooled one way or another. But if not, a $5/month VM in another country and a VPN tunnel should do the job.

logicchains3• 1 year ago

Australia requires ID to purchase alcohol yet alcohol usage among under 18s is widespread.

muteor• 1 year ago

Kids will just ask strangers to verify the age for them or use a strangers token. I can see the WhatsApp token swapping groups already, you know just the sort of place children will meet actually dangerous people.

BLKNSLVR5• 1 year ago

I mean, on the flipside, it's teaching kids to think outside the box...

SlowTao3• 1 year ago

It will be interesting to see this in action. It could be like any jail breaking scene, becomes an arms race between the jail and those trying to escape it.

As interesting as it is, it should have never come to this.

KurSix3• 1 year ago

This kind of regulation always seems to underestimate two things: how resourceful teens are, and how easy it is to route around controls like this with a VPN or a fake birthday

jaza• 1 year ago

Sounds like Australian kids will just use private / incognito browser windows (aka porn mode) even more than they do already. I fail to see what this new "policy" will achieve, apart from my above point, plus serving as an excuse for Google and pals to subject users to ever more facial recognition and to brazenly collect ever more personal data.

gonzo41• 1 year ago

This policy exists because parents won't do parenting anymore. Take away the phones and put a PC in the living room.

brainwad• 1 year ago

There's a collective action problem, though. One parent taking away their kid's phone is just isolating them from their friends, which might be a net negative. However, all the kids having their phones taken away would be a net positive.

bigB• 1 year ago

My thoughts on this is there is very few things that will stop a sufficiently motivated teenager. I Know this as I have these conversations alot with my kids. They will work around it or go to whatever is out of scope of the blocking.

The only thing the Australia Government is great at is political grandstanding, regardless of the party in power.

nottorp• 1 year ago

Heh, stop thinking of porn and similar stuff that a teenager will find a way to circumvent.

It's "normal" sites that are so crippled for minors for fear of liability that you end up telling your kids to just lie they're 24 when signing up.

LAC-Tech2• 1 year ago

Australia continues its descent into censorship, some what putting a hole in the theory that democracy and freedom of speech are anything more than co-related.

SlowTao3• 1 year ago

There is a frame of thought that goes like this. With any mass technology that has the ability to do harm, there are only two likely outcomes. Either you let the technology go free in which case the self terminating phase of blow back becomes a reality. Or you have to track is relentlessly/set rules in place that can be enforced, thus you bring about an authoritarian state dystopia.

This allows both sides to present an angle of resistance to the opposite. The freedom people will push back against control. The control side will push back against the worst outcomes.

I say this as somebody who is very much against this roll out. There is the middle way of rules and regulations but this is dependent on how you can allow some freedom without becoming too restrictive. This is a wild over correction but I am not surprised. This is, yet another typically aussie politician move. Slowly stepping into authoritarian state behind the guise of jingoistic "she will be right" attitude.

heavyset_go7• 1 year ago

This is just a step towards killing anonymity and free speech online, as well as a hand out to shady government contractors.

We are going to have to give our IDs and biometrics to untrusted 3rd parties just because some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet.

If these sites are so bad, maybe laws should instead target that problem. For example, make it illegal for social media companies to make their products addictive.

Instead, we get insanely invasive half-measures that impede on security, privacy and speech, with the added bonus of politicians whipping people up into moral panics in order to pass them.

trollbridge2• 1 year ago

Newsflash: pretty much every site like Google already knows exactly who you are. We gave up anonymity a long time ago in exchange for "free".

worthless-trash2• 1 year ago

But will be mandated now.

heavyset_go7• 1 year ago

That's not an excuse to add unaccountable 3rd parties to the mix that will take videos of your face and pictures of your IDs just to use the internet, and who will subsequently lose control of that data in inevitable breaches.

It's also doesn't justify any additional chilling of free speech.

willvarfar• 1 year ago

Google is one of the few free mail+everything+else providers that still lets people sign up and not give any kind of real-world identity. So you can, on a clean phone or laptop or whatever, create a new gmail account without any kind of auth and maintain that persona.

In practice this isn't how people are using google services though.

potamic• 1 year ago

You're missing the point. If one wants to be anonymous there are ways to do so. If we willingly give up anonymity in exchange for free in certain cases, that's our prerogative, but we must have the choice of not needing to do, when necessary.

aembleton• 1 year ago

That means they can just use 'AI to guess a user's age based on the data the company already has'

spwa4• 1 year ago

Except this is giving up anonymity, first, everywhere, not on a few sites. Two, the goal is to find an excuse to arrest you, not to get you to buy a birthday present for your niece when it's time. Well, that, and (this is Australia) to refuse you medical care because you looked up "best cigarette" 10 years ago, as well as refuse you unemployment because you Googled "how do people fake a handicap" after watching office space, 20 years ago.

exodust4• 1 year ago

pretty much every site like Google already knows exactly who you are

Depends how much you share with Google when signed in. If I log out of Google services and browse around the web, my browsing activity is not recorded against my Google account.

RachelF• 1 year ago

The "online safety" of kids is just an excuse, I suspect.

Australia really wants to be able to identify and track the ID of all their citizens online. No more Internet anonymity for them.

logicchains3• 1 year ago

Recently the Australian government's been talking about creating a national "internet hate" database to record criticism of Israel and the IDF, it's likely in service of that, as anonymity makes it harder to silence dissent.

elyobo• 1 year ago

Reasonable assumption but really our politicians just are that dumb.

spacephysics• 1 year ago

Jokingly, it’s not surprising given many of their short-term ancestors were prison guards or criminals.

Looks like the ruling gov still sees their citizens as such

sixtyj• 1 year ago

I am old enough to remember how hard it was to find access to adult mags.

I understand that they want to make it harder for kids to access the flood of material that will destroy their brains before they even realize it.

Unlimited access to materials not intended and understandable by evolving kids’ brains is not really good.

BBC Channel 4 had a documentary in which a psychologist described 16-year-old boys with erectile dysfunction coming into his counselling room.

Of course, it depends on how to do it technically, face id is maybe unnecessarily too much... and also the question is whether we want to pass more data to the FAANG giants…

Edit: Ok, not hard…But access was not instant and ubiquitous as it is now. IMHO that makes the difference.

logicchains3• 1 year ago

I understand that they want to make it harder for kids to access the flood of material that will destroy their brains before they even realize it.

This is hyperbolic crap. Since at least the 70s boys have been growing up with access to adult images and it hasn't "destroyed their brains". Certainly a minority of people have a problem with porn addiction, but even completely banning porn access to teens would just delay this a few years, at the expense of completely destroying internet anonymity.

heavyset_go7• 1 year ago

I am old enough to remember how hard it was to find access to adult mags.

It wasn't difficult to find, it was just in your parents' or siblings' drawers, or your friends had it, or you or someone else had Pay-per-view TV or one of the soft core channels, or you or someone had illegal cable/sattelite, or it was just out in the woods[1] for whatever reason.

No one's minds melted from that.

If access to content is so unhealthy for anyone, then policy should address that. For example, sites should throttle or cut heavy users off. Giving 3D models of our faces + our IDs/passports online just for some government contractor to lose them is a solution looking for a problem that it does not solve well.

Funnily enough, I was going through my grandfather's possessions from when he was a kid and found what can be described as cartoon adult content in with his comic books. This was shit from literally 100 years ago, and yet that generation turned out alright by most standards.

[1] https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_inexplicably_ubiquit...

huijzer• 1 year ago

BBC Channel 4 had a documentary in which a psychologist described 16-year-old boys with erectile dysfunction coming into his counselling room.

I think that must be another medical condition or the boy lied, but we’ve all been 16 here and seriously those problems are extremely unlikely. If there is one problem that 16 year old boys have it is a too active sex drive.

greatgib• 1 year ago

In the last 30 years it never was difficult. I remember very well that as a kid it was easy to buy them from kiosks despite being far from old enough. Otherwise there was books, movies on tv, things circulating at school like materials from parents found and stolen by kids...

And let's not even forget that maybe 50 to 100 years ago, "kids" could more commonly be married and have kids under this arbitrary limit of 18 years old and that did not make them crazier adults than what we have now. At that time, 20 was easily already mid life. Still take care to not compare with countries of today were kids are still able to marry young. These are usually retarded countries were kids are clearly forced and abused to do that.

SlowTao3• 1 year ago

Because we could see the direction this was going, for well over a decade now I have been slowly stepping away from internet use outside of what is absolutely necessary or just mundane.

Considering how we have gone from barely any form of tracking only 25 years ago to this. It will get worse.

KurSix3• 1 year ago

It's hard not to see how this could erode anonymity and free expression over time

verisimi• 1 year ago

The aim is to achieve a panopticon.

With a panopticon it doesn't matter whether you are actually being monitored (although it is conceivable that all online data could be reviewed by AI) - the mere idea of being monitored changes behaviour. Loss of anonymity in public spaces, the concern that one's citizen score could be impacted by arbitrary rules, changes behaviour. Everyone will act unnaturally; some people will even cheer on these actions for bonus points.

People should be highly wary of ceding further freedom/authority to government, regardless of the 'children/terrorists/drugs/etc excuses'. The government desire to have order, should not be prioritised over individuals right to live freely. Freedoms are not re-granted by governments - getting them back will mean a fight, not a petition.

AstralStorm• 1 year ago

Panopticons are overrated. After a while, people start ignoring them as we see with social media.

Bender• 1 year ago

And this will lead to demand for ID-validated specific proxy malware that detect who has authenticated with ID services and give others a way to browse the web normally again through them. Those with the ID proxy malware will take the fall for anything the rest of us using the proxy do.

Maybe after a decade of wrongful arrests the laws will become more sane and just require server operators to use RTA labels [1] and clients to check for said labels to active optional parental controls as determined by the parents or legal guardians. No 3rd party leaky junk.

[1] https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

7bit• 1 year ago

We are going to have to give our IDs and biometrics to untrusted 3rd parties just because some people don't like the idea of other people's kids using the internet.

Depends on the implementation. Germany has digital passports already and for age verification the only data you transmit is your date of birth.

I don't know anything about Ozzy passports tho.

Smoosh2• 1 year ago

If these sites are so bad, maybe laws should instead target that problem.

We apparently live in a world where companies are legally considered to be people, and thus have rights, yet they have no moral obligations whatsoever.

ingohelpinger• 1 year ago

when did Australia go full communist?

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

What I love the most about this whole thing is that it's about limiting people's access to porn while evidence that porn is bad for you is dubious at best, while the real problem is big tech using algorithms to feed people's stupidity and addiction on personal basis... which as dystopic as it sounds, has been documented, proven, and accepted as the new normal. And with the new law it gives said big tech access to even more information about the user to target them with garbage even more effectively.

What do I say. Every day I'm even more disappointed in people. "So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

I'd rather use a VPN, it's instant and doesn't require me to go through a whole verification process.

I think VPNs are the easiest solution when this gets implemented. Easier than going through an age check.

exodust4• 1 year ago

If you already have a Google account where your location is stated and obvious, why do you think Google won't still demand your "papers please" after these Orwellian Labor party laws attempt to screw us?

KurSix3• 1 year ago

Protecting kids online is absolutely important, but introducing mandatory age checks at the search engine level (especially using methods like facial analysis or credit cards) opens up major privacy and surveillance concerns.

NoSalt• 1 year ago

Australia ... the ultimate "Nanny State".

Australia is introducing age checks for search engines like Google

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