The Australian government is planning to implement the world’s first social media ban for minors in the country by the end of the year, but the official trial report has made some major revelations.
According to The Guardian, the recent official trial of age assurance technologies aimed to restrict under-16s from accessing social media found that although there are effective options, errors are unavoidable.
The report suggested that the social media companies would be required to offer alternative “fallback options,” like ID checks to validate users’ age where age estimation technology fails.
The comprehensive report released by Communications Minister Anika Wells, on Sunday, August 31, evaluated 60 technologies from 48 age assurance vendors across 10 volumes.
A £6.5 million trial, conducted by the UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), tested different age verification methods, including facial age estimation, age verification using IDs, parental controls, parental consent, age inference and several other methods to restrict underage minors' access to social media and adult websites.
The report highlights that it was a “fundamental misunderstanding” that age-estimating technology could be used without a “margin of error.”
The report said, “False negatives will then be inevitable, and alternative methods will be required to correct them.”
“The implementation of buffer thresholds also plays a crucial role in enabling successive validation, a layered approach to age assurance where one method (e.g., age estimation) is followed by a second, more definitive method (e.g., document-based verification) when uncertainty is high,” it added.
It also found that facial age estimation technology had relatively high false rejection rates for 16- and 17-year-olds, at 8.5% and 2.6%, respectively, which is “above acceptable levels.”
Other major issues highlighted in the report were accuracy concerns for certain demographics, including older adults, non-Caucasian users, female-presenting individuals and indigenous people.
Notably, Australia’s under-16 social media ban will come into force in December.
