LOS ANGELES — Australians may be forced to submit to an identity verification service run by the federal government before accessing adult entertainment online, if recommendations from a parliamentary committee are followed. A report issued today calls for an "e-safety commissioner" to develop a procedure for mandatory age verification (AV) in the next 12 months.
The report, titled "Protecting the Age of Innocence," was issued by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs in Canberra.
The United Kingdom tabled a similar initiative last year.
The Guardian's Josh Taylor notes Australia's AV procedure would involve "minimal retention of personal information, so as to not create a honeypot of sensitive data," and the retained data must be stored securely.
Further, the committee did not recommend using a facial recognition service under development.
"The committee acknowledged that the plethora of pornography available on overseas websites," notes The Guardian, "in Google search results, and on social network sites like Twitter would not be able to be captured, many overseas sites would not comply with age verification requests from Australia, and that young people would likely bypass the verification system, but still said verification was the best way to reduce harm."
Further, the committee posits "more regulation could be considered to capture social media and others, and did not rule out potentially bringing back mandatory internet filtering, as some people in submissions to the inquiry had suggested."
Proclaimed committee chair Andrew Wallace, "We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Similar recommendations have been issued for gambling websites and "loot boxes sold in video games," notes The Guardian.
In the commentary to their own report, committee members acknowledge the U.K.'s stalled efforts at AV and call for further review of the issue, observing the public "may not trust a system that could potentially increase risks and have unintended consequences around data security and privacy."
Read the full article at The Guardian here.
View a PDF of the parliamentary committee report below.