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Age of online privacy coming to an end as Australia adopts digital ID

Published

1 month ago

3 minute read

 

 

By Didi Rankovic

 

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Defends Controversial Online Age Verification Digital ID Methods

Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner (to her critics – the country’s chief censor), has attempted to explain how Online Safety Amendment – Social Media Minimum Age Bill 2024 – will be enforced.

The bill mandates online age verification, and bans minors under 16 from using social platforms, in what is described as “the strictest crackdown” yet in the world – with many in the world, no doubt, looking at how things pan out in Australia before they make their own restrictive moves.

The “small” question that remains to be answered Down Under now is – how does the government propose to determine the age of a person using an online platform, before the government orders them to be banned?

Grant may be trying to sell one method as less invasive, less potentially harmful, and otherwise controversial than another – but they appear to be as bad as each other, only in different ways.

“There are really only three ways you can verify someone’s age online, and that’s through ID, through behavioral signals, or through biometrics,” she told NPR.

The “ID” route means that every internet user would have to provide government-issued documents to platforms, revealing their real-world identity to these platforms and anyone else they’re in business with (such as governments and data brokers) and ending online anonymity for everyone.

And that, in fact, is the only sure-fire way to determine someone’s age. The other two produce estimates. The biometrics Grant mentions refer to uploading selfies to companies like Yoti, who then guess a user’s age.

Related: The 2024 Digital ID and Online Age Verification Agenda

Better than the “ID” method – that is, if you believe it’s a good idea for minors, or anyone, to just hand over biometric data to third parties.

Then, there are “behavioral signals” – and it sounds positively bonkers that a government would entertain the idea of deploying such technology on/against its citizens.

Grant said she met with yet another third party in the US – “an age assurance provider” – this unnamed company doesn’t monitor and analyze your facial features, but hand gestures. For age verification.

Like so: “Say you do a peace sign then a fist to the camera. It follows your hand movements. And medical research has shown that based on your hand movement, it can identify your age.”

One way to look at all this is that tech is being developed to step up online surveillance, while a flurry of “think of the children” laws may be here to legitimize and “legalize” that tech’s use.
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Cyberattack on Ukraine Exposes The Dangers of Digital ID Systems

Published on January 27, 2025

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By Ken Macon

Digital ID systems risk becoming massive vulnerabilities in the face of modern cyber threats.

Ukraine’s reliance on its new digital identity systems has become a warning about the dangers of digital ID, as a recent cyberattack exposed critical vulnerabilities in the country’s digital infrastructure.

Last month, several key government databases were taken offline, disrupting essential services like legal filings and marriage registrations. Officials assured citizens that the controversial Diia, the government’s widely used e-governance app, would soon be restored, but the incident laid bare significant risks within the app’s centralized backend platform, Trembita.

This breach, the most serious since Trembita’s launch in 2020, raises urgent questions about the security of Ukraine’s growing dependence on digital IDs and is a clear warning to other countries that are rushing to embrace the controversial tech.

Trembita, the platform enabling Diia’s operations, functions as a digital network connecting government databases. While officials insisted it operated as designed during the breach, cybersecurity experts are sounding alarms.

Mykyta Knysh, a former Ukrainian security official, described the platform’s centralized architecture as a dangerous “single point of failure.” Warnings about these risks had surfaced before — security analysts cautioned in 2021 that consolidating sensitive personal and administrative data under Diia would leave Ukraine exposed to large-scale attacks.

The Russian hacking group XakNet has claimed responsibility for the attack.
This highlights a broader danger inherent in Ukraine’s ambitious digitalization efforts, spearheaded by the Ministry of Digital Transformation under the Zelensky administration.

While consolidating government services into the smartphone-based Diia app has streamlined access for millions of citizens, the breakneck pace of implementation has left little time to address critical security gaps.

The compromised registries contained highly sensitive data, including personal addresses, family connections, and financial assets.

Beyond military implications, the breach exposes the inherent risks of digital ID systems. Security analysts have pointed out that a central repository of personal data, as seen in Ukraine’s system, creates lucrative targets for hackers. If exploited, such data could fuel identity theft, phishing campaigns, or even more devastating cyberattacks, undermining public trust in digital governance.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

WEF Pushes Public-Private Collaboration to Accelerate Digital ID and Censorship

Published on January 26, 2025

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By Didi Rankovic

World Economic Forum pushes private funding for UN-led agendas under the guise of resilience and collaboration.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has prepared a white paper – titled, Resilience Pulse Check: Harnessing Collaboration to Navigate a Volatile World – to go with its ongoing annual meeting taking place this week in Davos.

Yet again reiterating the main theme of the gathering – “collaboration” – the document seeks to promote it among private and public sector entities in order to speed up the process of reaching UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This collection of 17 interconnected goals is criticized by opponents of the spread of digital ID and censorship, since the first is openly, and the second indirectly pushed via the initiative – when it deals with “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation” that the UN wants to be treated as threats to information integrity, which negatively impact the ability to achieve the SDGs.

The WEF white paper states that its own goal was to find out how businesses are tackling “today’s challenges,” opting once again for some doom-mongering by revealing that responses from 250 (highly likely hand-picked) participants, leaders from the public sector, showed that “84% of companies feel underprepared for future disruptions.”

And among the ways to achieve greater “resilience” in this context, the WEF endorses the SDGs, as well as the Paris Agreement (on climate change), and the “societal shifts” they aim for.

The white paper invites businesses to “work collectively” and promotes public-private collaboration as “essential” – as it turns out, mainly to find efficient ways to bankroll SDGs with private sector money.

The WEF wants to see “determined (and coordinated) action across both the public and private sectors” to get there. This informal group with a massive influence on elites in a large number of countries also pushes a pro-SDG entity, the Global Investors for Sustainable Development (GISD) Alliance, and singles it out as a positive example.

The white paper’s authors explain that the GISD Alliance is led by the UN and gathers major financial institutions and corporations who are coming up with coordinated strategies to “channel private investment towards SDGs.”

That, however, is not enough – besides the UN-led alliance, the WEF sees other “still untapped opportunities to deepen public-private collaboration.”
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