Australia is now halfway through the year-long build-up to implementing its under-16 social media ban. Photo / Getty Images
A technical hurdle is jumped - or is it? - for Austrlia’s U16 social media ban. Apple stops “cyberflashing” and offers parents new safety tools. Elon Musk’s Robotaxi finally launches - but it’s playing catchup. SpaceX’s pain is Rocket Lab’s gain (again).
As Australia’s social media ban for under-16s looms, a preliminary report says there are “no significant technological barriers” to assessing someone’s age online.
Australia passed world-first legislation for a U16 social media ban on November 29 last year, with bipartisan support. It’s due to be implemented on December 10 this year.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, was given the task of finding practical ways to implement the ban.
An independent Age Assurance Technology Trial was commissioned that saw Age Check Certification Scheme – a UK firm – test various age-verification technologies from 53 different vendors.
We still don’t know what they are. The two-page preliminary report had scant detail. But Inman Grant has previously discussed technologies that guess someone’s age from their facial features, and alternatives that assess age from the way a person moves.
More blunt methods are off the table. You have to be over 18 to own a credit card in Australia. And the legislation explicitly prohibits the use of a government ID such as a passport or driver’s licence, due to privacy concerns.
The trial’s project director, Tony Allen, the chief executive of Age Check Certification Scheme, said “there are no significant technological barriers” to assuring people’s ages online. He added the solutions are “technically feasible, can be integrated flexibly into existing services and can support the safety and rights of children online”.
An ABC News report implied the initial report took a rose-tinted view of the results, saying the trial found face-scanning technologies “repeatedly misidentified” children as young as 15 as being in their 20s and 30s.
These tools could only guess children’s ages “within an 18-month range in 85% of cases”, ABC News said. Meanwhile, Reuters talked to school kids who had been on the trial, who said no-one had tried to game software tests on them, but there had been talk of using a brother or a sister as a stand-in for a selfie test.
The eSafety Commissioner’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. We should learn more when the full report is released next month.
It could be a case of Australia’s politicians deciding if 85%, or around that mark, is good enough accuracy – particularly when the legislation provides for an up to A$50 million ($54m) penalty if the likes of X, SnapChat, TikTok and Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) fail to take “reasonable steps” to enforce the ban.
Meanwhile, a poll of 4000 Australians released last week by Communications Minister Anika Wells found nine out of 10 Australians supported the U16 ban.
But it also found a large number of people were “very concerned” about how the ban would be implemented. Nearly 80% of respondents had privacy and security concerns, while roughly half had concerns about age assurance accuracy and government oversight.
Here, research commissioned by 2degrees found 73% of respondents are in favour of a social media ban for under-16s – but again also had concerns about enforcement challenges.
The New Zealand Government was initially opposed, but is now swaying (a private member bill by National MP Catherine Wedd was superceded by the party adopting an U16 ban as part of its “programme as work” on an undefined timeline), perhaps mindful of the popular mood, the rise of the new B416 ginger group backed by right-leaning figures like Anna Mowbray and Cecilia Robinson, and the success and ultimate popularity of a related push – its cellphone ban in schools.
An outright social media ban is a lot harder to enforce. The path of least resistance could be for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Internal Affairs Minister Brook van Velden to hold off and see whether the Australian push – a world-first – does find a practical way to ban under-16s from Facebook, bearing in mind it will face the immediate pain of trying to weed out an army of over-13s who are currently using social media.
Here, the closest person we have to Inman Grant’s opposite number is Netsafe chief executive Brent Carey.
Carey has been a strident critic of a U16 ban.
“The logistics of a ban are a bureaucratic fever dream. Age verification online is a mess,” the Netsafe head wrote in a recent guest editorial for the Herald.
“Even if you could technically pull off a ban, you’d still hit a bigger wall: cultural and social harm,” Carey added.
“Social media, for all its flaws, is where young people express themselves. It’s where a 15-year-old queer kid in a rural town finds community. Where Māori or Pasifika teens stay connected to diaspora.
“We cannot legislate our way back to innocence. We can only prepare the next generation to live well in the world they’ve inherited.”
Netsafe’s critics have pointed out that Carey and his opposite number across the Tasman speak from different contexts.
Inman Grant is a civil servant. The eSafety Commissioner is 100% fully funded by the Australian Government.
Carey heads Netsafe – the approved agency to act on complaints under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2016 (HDCA), which gets nearly all of its funding from contracts with the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Education, but also gets a small amount from private tech firms and works with them on voluntary codes.
But supporters of the set-up – including retired District Court Judge David Harvey (who consulted to the Law Commission review that led to the HDCA) – say it gives Carey a necessary degree of independence; a removal that lets him criticise the Government when warranted.
And Netsafe has also savaged Big Tech at times, including in February this year when its chief safety officer Sean Lyons was signatory to an open letter to Meta after changes to the tech giant’s content policies following founder Mark Zuckerberg’s “Maga” awakening.
“Meta’s rollback of protections risk eroding hard-won safeguards that ensure users feel safe and included in online social environments,” the letter said.
Shortly after, Meta expanded an Instagram safety feature, Teen Accounts, to cover New Zealand users – including parental control features and teen accounts being made private by default – meaning only approved followers can see their content or message them. Yet all the controls are predicated on a teen having a single account in a system that takes their stated age on trust.
Apple has also been bolstering its protections for kids – and because it often involves a phone and parental consent needed for the download or purchase of apps, there is less-to-no scope for fibbing about age.
At its 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the tech giant previewed several new features that will debut with iOS 26, iPadOS26 and the latest version of its macOS and WatchOS software – all due later this year.
They include what’s been called an “anti-cyber-flashing” measure that will detect and blur nudity on a FaceTime call. It can also blur out nudity in a shared Photo Album.
The feature will be on by default, with the option for parents to turn it off.
Another new safeguard will send requests to their parents when they want to communicate with new phone numbers – which a parent can approve with a single tap in Messages.
Another, called Declared Age Range, will let a child share their age with an app without giving away their exact birthdate.
By the end of the year, apps will have three age ratings: 13+, 16+ and 18+. This should give parents an easier handle on whether to approve an ask-to-download or ask-to-buy request.
Apple already requires under-13s to have a Child Account. When iOS 26 is introduced, there will also be a series of “age-appropriate” protections automatically applied to the accounts of those aged 13 to 17, including web content filters and communications safety measures.
There will also be a new framework called PermissionKit – an API (application programming interface) that lets third-party app makers easily adopt Apple features such as age-range and parental permission to communicate with new contacts.
“The streamlined set-up for child accounts and enhanced parental controls – like requiring approval for contacting unfamiliar numbers and temporary app access – are valuable additions that give parents more say in managing their children’s digital lives,” Carey said after reviewing Apple’s latest protections.
“While these tools are a welcome addition, Netsafe would reiterate that technology is only one part of the solution,” the Netsafe CEO added.
“Education, open communication within families and broader societal efforts to address online and offline harms are just as important.”
After years of delays, Tesla finally began a limited trial of its driverless Robotax in Austin, Texas on Sunday (Monday NZT) - complete with a Tesla employee in the front seat as a safety monitor.
Elon Musk sees Robotaxis as a multibillion-dollar business. Perhaps they’ll get there. For now, his firm is playing catchup.
In LA last November, I took an hour-long ride in a driverless Waymo. The Google-backed service was cheaper than an Uber and everything worked fine - including pulling over to let an emergency vehicle past (see my videos and report here).
At the time, Waymo was already commercially operating 700 vehicles across San Francisco, LA and Phoenix.
In March, Waymo rubbed salt into Robotaxi’s wounds by launching in Austin.
Earlier this year, some analysts saw Musk utilising his close ties to the Trump administration to cut regulatory red tape for an accelerated Robotaxi launch. Recent events make that seem less likely.
Things That Go Boom Dept: Rocket Lab shares jumped 9% today to an all-time high of US$32.78 (for a US$15.3 billion market cap).
The Kiwi-American firm’s stock got a boost when SpaceX CEO Musk had a public falling out with Donald Trump and the US President pulled the Musk-backed appointment for NASA administrator.
The latest catalyst is the Starship explosion on Friday NZT.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
'Significant items are chunky' said one institutional investor of today's announcement.