The Weekly Cybers #65
So where are the bold digital policies this election? Is “social media scary protect kiddies” all we can look forward to? Do we need a public digital infrastructure?
The Weekly Cybers #65 | 24 April 2025
Welcome
It’s been a very short work week, what with Easter last weekend and Anzac Day tomorrow. And it’s the election campaign. And the Pope died. So there’s not a lot this week.
How’s all that election stuff going?
There’s been surprising little reporting on election misinformation this week, so here’s a few stories of interest.
- From Crikey ($), Victorian Liberals left some data fields exposed, with two fields labelled “predicted Chinese” and “predicted Jewish”. Your writer can understand why a politician might want to target their messages according to individual’s interests and such, but one does wonder about “predictions”.
- Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots has been spending heaps on YouTube, as you may well have noticed.
- From Mumbrella, “Will the federal election be won and lost on TikTok?”
- A former parliamentary researcher says an appeal to MPs’ raw voting patterns such as those provided by They Vote for You can be misleading. It’s complicated, y’see.
If you do find a particularly brazen bit of election information, you can let me know my replying to this email.
Where’s the digital policy in this election?
Friend of the Cybers Cam Wilson made an interesting observation in Wednesday’s The Sizzle, a newsletter that’s well worth your attention. Here it is in full, with his permission.
Many are calling this the most boring tech election ever
The most high-profile tech moment of the Australian election so far has been both men who want to be prime minister furiously agreeing on the flawed teen social media ban (ITNews). At [Tuesday night’s] debate, it was just about the only thing Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton agreed on. This comes as there’s a growing consensus in the Australian tech press that YouTube’s exemption from the teen social media ban makes no sense and undermines the policy’s point (AFR, $). One place there isn’t consensus is with experts (SBS) and teens (Pew Research) who both have nuanced views on the benefits and downsides of social media. It’s crazy to me that tech policy has never been more interesting, important or contested — but you wouldn’t know that if you listened to our political contest.
Thanks, Cam.
For mine, with those social media age restrictions, it does seem odd that the politicians are together on one side and utterly simplistic in their approach, and the experts and the people actually affected are on the other. It’s almost as if politicians exist in a separate reality from the rest of us.
Not that they can always agree on that reality. As ABC News has reported, emails have revealed the government’s mixed messaging on YouTube’s exemption to the restrictions. Is the decision still to come? Or was it made months ago?
More broadly, with digital policy being a key factor that will shape our society’s future, and with a certain superpower being reshaped by its digital billionaires, it’s worth noting that our leaders have little to say on the matter apart from it all being scary bad for the kiddies.
EFA’s election scorecard: The best is just 4 out of 6
Digital rights organisation Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has published an Election Scorecard showing where the major parties stand on various digital rights issues — Labor, the Coalition, and The Greens.
Even though The Greens like to promote their tech credentials, they still supported the two bills about identity management, the Digital ID Bill 2024 that created the Australian Government Digital ID System (AGDIS), and the Identity Verifications Services Bill 2023, giving them a score of 4 out of 6.
The Coalition scores 2 points for supporting increased penalties for privacy breaches and its opposition to the Digital ID Bill — although the latter was down to them wanting more private-sector involvement up front.
Labor gets its single point for the Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2024, which covers things including children’s privacy, a civil tort for privacy, and compensation for privacy breaches.
You can click through to see EFA’s detailed arguments. There’s a lot of nuance with this stuff, and I’m sure we’ll come back to that in the future.
Also in the news
- Australia needs a public digital infrastructure, says Dr Raffaele F Ciriello, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney. “Securing Australia’s sovereignty over digital infrastructure is essential to building an online ecosystem grounded in democratic values,” he writes.
- Google wants to run its subsea cables from Maroubra beach to avoid “congestion” in the designated cable protection zone that runs from North Bondi to South Coogee.
- Meanwhile, Australia’s new Cable Connectivity and Resilience Centre, which was announced last year to limit China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, is now going to be run by consultants, according to InnovationAus ($).
- Australia should have a concession-priced broadband service to help low-income households stay connected during the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, according to to Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN). Some 69% of Australians support the idea, says the research they commissioned.
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Elsewhere
- Google may be on the brink of a breakup after having lost a couple of key court cases in the US about running an illegal monopoly. In what is definitely a helpful gesture, OpenAI of ChatGPT fame has offered to buy the Chrome web browser from Google. Reassuring.
- From Cyber Daily, “Meta has begun using AI on Instagram to monitor the ages of its users, ensuring that those under 16 are using age-appropriate accounts.” I think they mean “guess the ages...”.
- Social discussion platform Discord is doing the same.
- From The Conversation, “Could you accidentally sign a contract by texting an emoji? Here’s what the law says ... Emojis can have more legal weight than many people realise. A search of the Australasian Legal Information Institute database reveals emojis have been part of evidence in at least 240 cases in the past few years.”
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: My good friend Snarky Platypus and I have produced the pilot episode of a new podcast, Another Untitled Music Podcast. Look for it under that title in your podcast app of choice. Yes, it’s about music.
Inquiries of note
Nothing this week, which is to expected.
What’s next?
The Australian government is in caretaker mode for just one more week, until the federal election on Saturday 3 May, so there will be policy pitches but few real actions before then.
DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
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This is not specifically a cyber security newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.