Google is considering allowing people to store and share identification documents such as their passport or driver’s licence on their phone, as part of the Australian government’s test of technologies to enforce the upcoming social media ban for under 16s.
But while the proposed system will likely offer benefits for adults who have access to identification, it will probably be less useful for identifying teenagers without ID documents, raising questions about how helpful the technology would be for the ban.
It isseven months until the social media banfor children under 16 is due to come into effect, but how it will work is still being determined.
A trial of the technology that could be used for checking user ages on social media apps will be completed in June. The communications minister is also expected to decide which social media platforms it will apply to in the near future.
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Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), which is running the trial, did not publicise the progress of the trial during the course of the federal election campaign. However, this week the company released theminutes of a meeting heldwith stakeholders in March.
In the meeting, the Age Verification Providers Association executive director, Iain Corby, told the meeting that Google was “considering” submitting a proposal to “allow users to store an age credential in their Google Wallet and share it with apps and websites when needed”.
Separately, Google announced at the end of April that it would implement ID passes in Google Wallet in the UK – after already making it available in the US.
Underthis system, users can take an issued ID such as a passport or licence, hold the information in the wallet, and share their date of birth with a website or app without sharing any other personal information.
In a website or app, it would offer a prompt similar to existing payment verification methods to allow users to share this information, and would use the existing authentication methods like passcode, fingerprint or facial recognition associated with phone-based payments.
Google also announced in February it was testing a “machine learning-based age estimation model” to determine whether a user is under or over 18.
Google was approached for comment.
Apple announcedsimilar technology in February, but the committee noted in its attempts to ask Apple about the technology, that the tech giant “has been unresponsive, despite multiple outreach attempts”.
Dr Alexia Maddox, director of digital education at La Trobe University, said Google’s proposal could be a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the social media ban legislation.
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“The bill aims to protect children under 16, but Google Wallet is primarily an adult-oriented service that most children don’t have access to,” she said. “This creates a paradoxical situation where the very users the legislation aims to identify and protect – children – would be unlikely to have the verification tool being proposed.”
Maddox warned against “retrofitting an existing commercial product rather than developing a purpose-built solution for child protection”.
“For age verification to be effective and compliant with the bill’s privacy protections, we need approaches that work for all age groups, preserve privacy, destroy data after verification, and don’t further concentrate data in the hands of major tech platforms.”
Before the social media ban legislation passed in December, Meta and TikTok pushed the government to make Apple and Google, as the device makers, bear responsibility for age assurance, but the federal government decided the onus should rest on the app makers.
As part of the trial, more than 1,000 students across five states will participate in testing of at least 25 different age verification or assurance methods, with priority placed on facial age estimation technology.
The trial will test some ways children may try to get around the verification, the meeting heard.
Following the re-election of the Albanese government, consultation will also continue on which platforms the ban should apply to. Guardian Australia revealed last month the chief executive of YouTubepersonally lobbied the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, less than 48 hours before she announced YouTube would be exempt from the ban.
The news sparked fury from YouTube’s rivals, Meta and TikTok, over what was deemed to be a “sweetheart” deal for the platform.
During the election campaign, the federal infrastructure department, which is overseeing the consultation, wrote to Meta stating “while the former minister for communications proposed to exclude YouTube, no legislative rules have been made giving effect to this”.