From December, Australians will need to verify their age in order to access pornography sites and other sites hosting adult content.
How will it work, what will we need to do, and can we avoid it?
What’s changing?
The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, announced this week that industry-designed codes covering adult content and extreme violence or self-harm content would go into force in two tranches – in December this year and March next year.
The first tranche in December will cover search engines, server hosts and internet service providers (which are only required to offer family-friendly internet filters to customers).
The second tranche, in March, will cover websites, social media, storage services, AI chatbots, app stores and equipment providers like phone makers or console developers.
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Is this related to the under-16s social media ban?
This process was under way before the Albanese government decided to legislate to ban under 16s from social media, but some of the changes will come in around the same time, and the methods used to confirm ages will be the same.
Social media sites will need to both restrict under-16s from accessing adult content, but also by March prevent under-18s from being able to access adult content on their services. Some, like Meta, already do not allow adult content, while others like X do.
What will be required?
It will mean many of these services will need to check the ages of their users. If you want to visit a porn site, search for unfiltered search results, look at adult content on sites like X or Reddit, download apps meant for 18+ users like dating apps, use an AI chatbot that can generate sexually explicit content or use a messaging service or online game rated 18+, those services will need to be assured you’re over 18.
For ISPs and device makers, the requirements are around providing options such as child-friendly accounts rather than verifying ages.
The eSafety commissioner has argued this is not an “unprecedented change” to the way Australians use the internet, but for searches it at least formalises practices already in place, and something other parts of the world are doing at the same time.
Companies that fail to comply could face fines of up to $49.5m.
How will these companies verify people’s ages?
The eSafety commissioner has said the method of verification is up to those individual companies, as long as it is deemed an “appropriate age-assurance measure”. The commissioner has outlined such measures could include:
Confirmation by a parent of age
Photo ID
Facial age estimation
Credit card checks
Digital identity wallets or systems
Age inference by examining a user’s behaviour, interests, or other factors such as the length of time since account registration
Third-party age-assurance vendors
Most of these methods were examined in the age-assurance technology trial, which released its report at the end of August.
So, adult sites could be forced to collect photo IDs for everyone who wants to look at porn?
In theory, yes, if they decide to use that method.
The sites users pay for will likely cover one-off age checks through people paying via credit card – eg Onlyfans – but for the free sites like Pornhub, they will be required to implement one of the other methods.
The eSafety commissioner has said that the companies must “minimise the collection of personal information” and comply with privacy laws, but there are no restrictions beyond those that exist for other companies regarding the collection of personal information.
Will it be a one-off check or multiple verifications?
The eSafety commissioner’s office has said some services may allow one-off age checks, while others might require session-by-session checks.
“Providers must balance effectiveness with usability and privacy,” eSafety said.
Why is the government cracking down on pornography?
Inman Grant told Guardian Australia in 2021 – when the online safety bill was before the parliament under the former Coalition government – that, amid sex worker fears the legislation would force them off the internet, she didn’t intend to use her powers under the legislation to go after consensual adult pornographic material online.
“My role as a regulator is to protect all Australians from online harm, it’s not to throttle the sex industry,” she said at the time. “What happens between consenting adults is not my concern, as long as it’s not harming others.”
However, in a frequently asked questions for the changes released this week, the eSafety commissioner’s office said that the federal government has decided pornography is legal but restricted its access to adults.
”Age restrictions for pornography and other high-impact material are a lot like those for cigarettes, alcohol and public gambling,” eSafety said. “They allow the community to protect children from things that might endanger their immediate safety or harm their long-term health and development.”
The office highlighted its study which found about 10% of children have accidentally stumbled on porn online by the age of 10, increasing to almost 30% by 13.
Will people be able to use VPNs to get around the age verification?
When the UK recently implemented a similar age verification system for adult sites, in the first week of it launching, four of the top five downloaded apps in the Apple app store were virtual private network (VPN) apps, with Proton reporting an 1800% increase in downloads of its VPN app.
VPNs allow users to appear to sites that they’re in another location, which could bypass age check requirements in Australia.
The eSafety commissioner’s office has said the age-assurance trial report found geolocation technology and other signals could be used to detect if users are trying to use a VPN. The report itself suggests VPN users should not be blocked, but checked with age verification. That could mean that, if implemented, anyone using a VPN anywhere in the world to access the sites would have to verify their age, despite not being in Australia.
However, people in the UK have been urged not to use VPNs, amid calls for the age-assurance system to be expanded to require VPN companies to check ages.
Won’t this mean people are pushed onto dodgier sites that refuse to comply with the law?
That is a possibility, along with sites simply choosing to block Australian users altogether, and it is something critics of the UK age assurance system have warned is happening there.
The BBC reported last month that there was a 47% decrease in traffic to Pornhub when the age check came in, with XVideos also down 47%, but there had been increases in site visits to smaller and less regulated pornography sites.
Pornhub told the BBC that where these changes are brought in across the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites, and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.
