Age verification for adult websites may incorporate the rollout of government ID, the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, has said.
In March, the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, delivered a long-awaited report outlining a potential roadmap for verifying that Australian users visiting websites hosting pornography and other adult content are over 18 years old. The roadmap has yet to be released.
On Tuesday, Rowland said the government would release the report in the “near future”, but would first need to determine how the government response might cover other reforms, including changes to the Privacy Act and the rollout of government digital ID.
“We’re working through this methodically,” she said. “We are considering this as a whole within government because of course we’ve got other portfolios, we’re looking at digital identifiers, so really drawing all this together. We will do this expeditiously.”
The federal government allocated $26.9m in the budget to the development of digital government ID. The project is likely to advance this year off the back of the Optus and Medibank data breaches and concern about businesses holding so much personal information about customers.
Critics of age verification systems say that if businesses are forced to set up their own systems that require people to share identity documents it could lead to online “honeypots” and open people up to blackmail. Rowland said she acknowledged people had those concerns, and it was something the government was considering in its response.
“We’re in an environment in Australia where people are reticent to give over their data … We have every intention of bringing this to a conclusion and releasing the report,” she said. “But we’re doing it methodically and within those parameters, and we understand how important this is.
“We do not want young people having unfettered access to pornography.”
Inman Grant said the roadmap sought to strike the right balance in preventing children from accessing pornography but also ensuring people – particularly older teens – can find information about sexual identity or gender identity online.
“It’s a very contextual thing. We’re not looking at a blunt force type approach and that wouldn’t be something that minister would support anyway, we’re also looking at holistic approach,” she said. “Making sure that we’re balancing the three legs of stool of privacy, security and safety.
Inman Grant said the review had assessed all the current available technologies for age verification or age estimation, and their limits, adding that there had been a wide set of views among those consulted and there would never be one agreed position.
