00:00I think we will see, according to these rules, we will see from December 27 that search engines
00:08will be required to use some form of age assurance technology on users who sign in.
00:14And the alternative there is facing a fine of almost $50 million from the eSafety Commissioner
00:20per breach.
00:22So this will cover Google, as you say, which has more than 90% share of the Australian
00:27market, also Microsoft, and the practical effect for logged in users.
00:32So if you log in and you're demonstrated to be under 18, your search results will then
00:38be filtered.
00:39It'll filter out things like high impact violence, pornography, eating disorder content.
00:45There's a whole list of content that will be caught theoretically under these filters.
00:50You can, of course, still search without signing in, without logging in.
00:54And then you'll experience a kind of default safety setting where images of pornography
00:59or high impact violence will be blurred.
01:01But you may not experience that, you know, like filtering out of entire links and, you
01:07know, that total kind of control that or high level of control that under 18 users will experience.
01:13We don't know yet how search engines will go about checking our ages, much like with the
01:18social media ban.
01:20It'll be down to the companies themselves.
01:22There's a bit of a menu of options available to them under these rules.
01:26Things like photo ID, face scanning, credit card checks.
01:30And then there's a really frictionless option that they may go for, which is just guessing
01:34your age using, it's called age inference, using AI based on the data they already have
01:40about you.
01:41And if you think about, you know, how much data a browser has on its users, you know, it
01:45can be a lot of data, so they might just be able to work it out in the background.
01:50Whether or not it'll keep young people safer is a different question.
01:53So Professor Lisa Given from RMIT University says that there may be a few ways around these
02:01controls.
02:02It serves as a bit of a gatekeeping function.
02:04But at the end of the day, where there's a will, there's a way.
02:07People can definitely still access this content by not logging into an account.
02:12They could also use a VPN to get around it by pretending to not be in Australia, for example.
02:17And of course, in many people's homes, there's often like a family account where people might
02:22have a shared laptop logged in all the time.
02:25Parents are going to have to be very careful to ensure that they are logged out of an adult
02:30account in order for these kind of controls to be appropriately in place.
02:35You know, on the other hand, you know, what the eSafety Commissioner is saying is really
02:39these new rules aren't intended to be the be all and end all.
02:43They are part of a larger layered framework that is being brought in where age checks may
02:50exist at not just the search engine level, but at various different points.
02:55And it's, you know, a bigger picture that will keep young people safe from a lot of these harms online.
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