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Australians will soon need their age checked to log into online search tools – here’s why
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
45 points (97.9% liked)
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Interestingly apart from effectively mandating "safe search" on by default, this doesn't appear to attempt to restrict users who aren't logged in.
Seems like a case of a Industry lobby group getting out ahead of the government to try to push an agenda to me.
Logged in users are worth more than logged out users as far as digital profiling and advertising so let's conceal the juicy stuff behind a log in. Doing it this way makes the government the scapegoat. So I would guess 100% compliance isn't anything too concerning, they just want to juice their numbers to make line go up.
If Google & Microsoft have to degrade our privacy and freedoms to raise their Oceania region profitability by 0.00000001% that's a price they are happy for us to pay.
I don't see anything in the document as written that would stop users who aren't logged in from turning off safe search etc.. Of course it's in the company's interest to interpret it that way, but I would think an honest interpretation based on the current document would dramatically reduce the user value of being logged in to a search engine.
Sorry I just see a "In compliance with government regulation to provide you with a full set of search results you need to be logged in" prompt in the near future. If they can drive people to log in, or even better/worse make people who haven't had an account create one, I see some big financial incentives for them to do so. Of course that is going to be offset by the potential cost of any breaches, but I can also see the silver lining on that of raising a bigger barrier to entry for any new competition that wants to get started in Australia, and a bit of supporting legislation that blocks "non-compliant" search engines from being accessed in Australia might actual serve to increase lock in. Maybe I am just being paranoid, but when I see an Industry aligned body co-authoring legislation I start to look for their angle.