The Australian Government has commissioned a landmark trial of age assurance technologies, which is due to report this summer. Verifymy has submitted a number of its methods for this independent assessment, including our innovative email-based age estimation solution. This article delves into how the trial came about, the scope of the study and the implications for Australian law and online safety regulations.
The road to the trial: Policy shifts and political influence
The trial has a long history, first recommended by the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant, in her Roadmap for Age Verification, published in March 2023. Initially, the Australian government was hesitant, concluding that age verification technology was not yet mature enough for investigation. However, the Commissioner later clarified that it was the market for age assurance, not the technology itself, that lacked maturity.
Political momentum played a significant role in advancing the initiative. The Opposition party announced that, if elected, it would commission a three-year pilot program, allocating six million Australian dollars to the project. Within weeks, the Government reviewed its stance and committed to a large-scale trial of age assurance technologies.
Who’s leading the trial? The role of the Age Check Certification Scheme
Following a competitive tender process in the second half of 2024, the Age Check Certification Scheme, a UK-based Conformity Assessment Body licensed by the UK government’s Accreditation Service, was awarded the contract.
Scope of the study: A broad approach to age assurance
The trial has now started, and at the start of the year, a call for participation was issued, seeking a wide variety of methods of age assurance to test. The scope of the trial is very broad, going beyond age verification and age estimation techniques to include controls imposed elsewhere in the technical stack, for example, by operating systems and app stores, as well as parental controls and parental consent mechanisms.
The trial is not only going to consider the accuracy of each approach but will also assess:
- Interoperability (how well the technology can be used across multiple online platforms);
- Reliability (how consistently the technology can produce the same result);
- Ease of use (how simple the technology is to operate);
- Minimisation of bias (how well the technology avoids racial or other bias);
- Protection of privacy (how well the technology protects users’ personal information, including data minimisation techniques);
- Data security (how well the technology safeguards users’ personal information from unauthorised access, breaches or theft through, for example, the use of security by design principles and resistance to presentation attacks); and
- Human rights protections (i.e. accessibility for all users, including people with disability, as well as applicable rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child).
International standards and testing methodologies
The trial is relying heavily on the latest international standard for age assurance, ISO 27566-1, which requires each method to be described in a “Practice Statement”. The auditors will then assess whether the solutions operate in accordance with the intended design.
Testing will be conducted at different levels depending on the technical readiness level of the approach. In some cases, what is being tested is still only conceptual, so this will be subject to what is known as a “static test” – in other words – a theoretical assessment.
Methods already widely in use will be assessed using mystery shoppers selected to be a representative sample of the Australian population, including its Indigenous people. This will also allow for an assessment of the user experience and given understanding of people’s willingness to use each of these options.
Implications for Australian law and online safety regulations
The trial is not intended to select any particular solution for a specific piece of legislation, for example, the recently passed law banning Australian children under 16 from social media. It will set out the advantages and disadvantages of each option, enabling lawmakers and regulators to make better decisions about implementing such laws. Nor is the trial intended to be a comparative, benchmarking study lining up different providers of the same solution against one another and determining which is the most accurate. Instead, it will give an overall picture of the general state-of-the-art of different forms of age assurance.
The project is due to report to Parliament and the government in June, after a general election in Australia. Whichever ministers are in office will need to respond quickly, working in partnership with the eSafety Commission, which has the responsibility to implement the social media law by November. In parallel, Class 2 codes tackling harmful content, required under earlier online safety legislation, may also lead to age assurance requirements shaped by the outcome of the trial.
Global impact: Setting a precedent for age assurance worldwide
Being the largest independent assessment of a broad range of age assurance options ever undertaken, Australia’s landmark age assurance technology trial will have an impact well beyond Australia. Verifymy has submitted more methods than any other vendor and looks forward to a positive set of results across a wide range of technology solutions to an important problem facing Australian society and the rest of the world.
As governments and regulators worldwide seek effective ways to balance online safety, privacy, and accessibility, the findings from this landmark trial will help shape the future of age assurance, setting a global precedent for responsible and innovative approaches to verifying user ages online.
If you want to learn more about Verifymy’s range of age assurance methods, please get in touch with us.
