The Privacy Nightmare Masquerading as Child Protection
The news broke quietly, almost like the government hoped we wouldn’t notice until it was too late. Come December, Australians will need to verify their age to access adult content online. The eSafety Commissioner’s office frames it as protecting children, but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find a privacy nightmare that would make George Orwell reach for his laptop.
Reading through the discussions online, it’s clear I’m not alone in feeling deeply uncomfortable about this entire scheme. The technical realities are stark - major sites like Pornhub have already started geo-blocking entire regions rather than deal with age verification requirements. They did it in Texas, they’ll do it here. We’re not special enough to warrant custom compliance systems.
What really gets under my skin is the breathtaking technical incompetence on display. The government expects people to hand over driver’s licenses and passport details to websites that, let’s be honest, aren’t exactly known for their robust cybersecurity practices. We’ve seen how well Australian companies handle personal data - Optus, Medibank, the list goes on. Now we’re supposed to trust random adult websites with our most sensitive documents?
The VPN discussion is particularly telling. Government officials seem to think they can somehow force overseas websites to require age verification from anyone using a VPN globally. The sheer arrogance is staggering. What jurisdiction do we have over a server in Romania? How exactly do they plan to enforce this against companies that can simply tell the Australian government to get stuffed?
Living through the earlier internet filter debates, I remember similar promises about protecting children that ultimately achieved nothing except creating new problems. This feels eerily familiar - a solution in search of a problem, designed by people who fundamentally misunderstand how the internet works.
The timing across multiple Western nations isn’t coincidental either. When you see similar policies rolling out simultaneously across Five Eyes countries without any real public consultation, you have to wonder whose agenda is really being served here. It certainly isn’t about child safety when the actual effect will be pushing people toward dodgier, unregulated sites with worse content and security practices.
What troubles me most is how this represents a fundamental shift in how we think about privacy online. Today it’s age verification for adult content, tomorrow it’s linking your government ID to every website you visit. The infrastructure being built here has far broader implications than just checking if someone’s over 18. Once that digital identity framework exists, mission creep is inevitable.
The whole thing feels like security theatre - expensive, invasive measures that create the appearance of action while solving nothing. Meanwhile, real issues like housing affordability, cost of living pressures, and climate change get pushed to the back burner while politicians chase moral panic headlines.
We need to push back hard on this before December. Contact your local MPs, support digital rights organizations, and make it clear that trading away privacy for the illusion of safety isn’t acceptable. The internet has always routed around censorship attempts - this won’t be different. But the damage to our digital rights could be permanent if we let it slide.
The government loves to talk about evidence-based policy, but the evidence from overseas implementations is clear: these systems don’t work, they create new risks, and they erode fundamental freedoms. Time to hold them accountable before we sleepwalk into a surveillance state wrapped in “think of the children” rhetoric.