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Use of VPNs to bypass age checks on porn sites to be investigated by Australia’s eSafety watchdog
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Perhaps worth noting that, IIRC, in Australia the law strictly prohibits these age verification processes from requiring ID.
I think the porn age-verification hooks off of the same law, passed a year or so earlier than the porn age-verification law, as the social media age-verification law. And I know that that law requires that they have some other means of verifying age. Some social media sites have simply used the age and/or content of the account to bypass the need for any verification that requires explicit user action. But for others, things like AI-based face age-detection have been used. They're allowed to offer ID verification as an option, but it cannot be their only means.
This is not meant as a defence of the law, btw. It's still crap. Just a clarification of one noteworthy difference between our law and the one in, say, Texas.
(Edit: just because it amuses me, I wish to clarify that by "our" I mean the whole of Australia; and by "Texas", I mean Texas, USA, and not Texas, Qld.)