Summary
Australia has introduced a bill to ban social media access for children under 16, enforcing strict penalties of up to AU$50 million for non-compliance.
The law would require biometric or government ID for age verification and prohibits parental consent as an exemption.
While aiming to protect children from harmful content, critics argue it may drive teens to unregulated platforms.
Some services, like YouTube and WhatsApp, will be exempt for educational or messaging purposes.
The bill has bipartisan support but faces scrutiny from independents and child welfare advocates.
this is just giving up privacy in exchange for children still bypassing it anyways lol
Yeah our governments, globally, are light years behind tech companies. I still need to send notarized letters for things when, as an American, the dod, nsa, fbi, cia, etc all are using palantir software by the quizat haderach Peter Thiel which has more information on me than any other involved party.
This just feels like a slow burn into making lisan al gaib able to observe everything I do.
It’s a feature not a bug.
Yay ineffective posturing! I hope they spent millions on Facebook ads… /s
The law would require biometric or government ID for age verification and prohibits parental consent as an exemption.
Fuck that noise. It’s almost as egregious as those US states that demand porn websites require Gov’t issued ID.
I don’t want copies of those documents processed by these corps; you just know they will use it to train their LLMs on it, store it inappropriately, and ultimately end up leaking them due to a misconfigured S3 bucket somewhere.
yeah but it’s australia. their under 16 is our under 91.
Good for Australia.
I get that it would probably be a net good if we could keep kids off social media. Unfortunately this is one of those things that the cost of any remotely effective enforcement is higher than the benefit in my view at least.
Do you think Lemmy will integrate biometric IDs for Australia?
This affects Adults too.
