The Weekly Cybers #73
Is the age assurance tech trial going well or badly? Depends who you ask. Also, Optus cops a $100 million penalty, Amazon to invest $20 billion, and Ghost Bat reaches an important milestone.
The Weekly Cybers #73 | 20 June 2025
Welcome
Australia’s social media age assurance technology trial domains the newsletter this week and unashamedly so — because it will affect every single Australian internet user.
News reports often focus on how it’ll affect children, and that’s certainly important. But everyone will have to demonstrate their age to open a social media account, order a beer delivery, access health information, watch a naughty video, or anything else that the government decides should be age-gated.
Mistakes are a problem, whether it’s a kind convincing The Machines they’re an adult, or an adult being denied legitimate access to the services they want.
And a key question in all of this is how big an error rate is considered OK. An accuracy of 95% sounds impressive until you realise that means a million online Australians would be treated incorrectly.
Apart from that, Optus has admitted to some appallingly racist and exploitative behaviour, Amazon is to spend $20 billion in Australia, and more.
Age assurance tech trial going well, or going badly, depending on who you ask
“Age assurance can be done in Australia and can be private, robust and effective,” according to the brief preliminary findings (PDF) released by the Age Assurance Technology Trial (AATT) on Friday.
“Our evaluation did not reveal any substantial technological limitations that would prevent age assurance systems being used in response to age-related eligibility requirements established by policy makers,” they write.
“The systems under test performed broadly consistently across demographic groups assessed and despite an acknowledged deficit in training age analysis systems with data about Indigenous populations.”
Overall variation across race and gender were within the permitted tolerances in IEEE 2089.1, the standard for “the design, specification, evaluation, and deployment of online age verification systems”, they write.
The project is proceeding according to the planned timeline and things are looking good — according to the project tea.
But what about this week’s damning ABC News report?
These assurances are curious, given the report from ABC News on Thursday which noted that the age-checking technology could mistake kids for 37-year-olds.
“Face-scanning technology tested on school students this year could only guess their age within an 18-month range in 85% of cases,” the ABC wrote.
“Sixteen-year-old Andy was misidentified as 19, 37, 26, and 23 years old by various face scanning tools he used... Seventeen-year-old Beth was given results ranging from 14 to 32.”
The project is revealing that the technology isn’t up to scratch and things are looking bad — according to any reasonably reading of those results.
When asked how AATT’s preliminary findings could be so positive given this report, the project’s director, Tony Allen, was dismissive.
“[That ABC story] related to a snapshot of some testing that they viewed about a month or two ago, when we were doing some media stuff with them,” he told a briefing session on Friday.
“They haven't seen the full results, and neither has anybody else seen the full results.”
Apparently that includes the project’s stakeholder advisory board.
The advisory board wasn’t consulted about these findings
“The Board did not review or provide input on the interim findings report,” said the board's chair, Professor John Rouse.
“The board members were not and have not been asked to endorse these findings in any way, and the board members received a verbal briefing very similar to what you've received to this one earlier this week.”
At least one board member was concerned that the preliminary findings’ statement about age assurance being private, robust, and effective, “could create false expectations from parents”.
Meanwhile, as Cam Wilson reported at Crikey ($), key circumvention techniques won’t be tested, including the use VPNs or the obvious method of getting someone else to sign you in.
AATT is aiming to present its final report to the communications minister by the end of July.
And what do parents and young people think?
The vast majority of Australians support using age assurance technology, according to the government’s age assurance consumer research finally released this Wednesday.
The research had in fact been completed in December last year.
The approval level is higher than that shown in a number of opinion polls over the last couple of years, which might be consistent with the increasing news focus on people’s bad online experiences. However a lot may have changed in the last six months.
Curiously, though, only 45.88% of parents use age-based filtering or parental controls, and overall awareness of age assurance methods “remained limited”.
And as Information Age reports, around 77% of adults were “very concerned” about the privacy and security issues, and around half “very concerned” about their accuracy.
Your writer has not yet had the chance to read the report in full. However friend of the newsletter and digital rights enthusiast Justin Warren has provided excellent analysis.
BONUS LINK: From Reuters, Australia’s teen social media ban faces a new wildcard: teenagers.
Optus cops $100M penalty for “unconscionable conduct” when selling to Indigenous customers
Optus had admitted to it. More than 400 customers were sold things they didn’t need and couldn’t afford. The telco has agreed to settle for $100 million.
Most of them were First Nations Australians from regional, remote, and very remote parts of Australia, many of them vulnerable or experiencing disadvantage —such as living with a mental disability, diminished cognitive capacity or learning difficulties, being financially dependent or unemployed, having limited financial literacy, or English not being a first language.
And when they couldn’t pay they were pursued by debt collectors, sometimes for years.
The examples listed in the ACCC media release might well make your blood boil.
Sometimes customers were pressured into buying more or more expensive products. Sometimes Optus staff “added a false ABN to their account and manipulated credit checks”.
Sometimes the customers didn’t even have Optus coverage where they lived.
“In respect of the Mount Isa store, which has now closed, Optus pursued debts in circumstances where its senior management knew that those debts related to contracts for goods and services that had been or might have been created without the knowledge of the affected consumers, the majority of whom were First Nations Australians from Mount Isa and the Northern Territory,” writes the ACCC.
Back in 2019 an internal Optus investigation had found 82 contracts that “appeared to have been fraudulently completed without consumer knowledge”.
Optus and the ACCC have agreed on the $100 figure, but it’s still up to the Federal Court to agree it’s appropriate.
Telstra was caught doing similar things in the past. In 2021 the company was ordered to pay a $50 million penalty for engaging in unconscionable conduct in relation to 108 Indigenous customers.
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Also in the news
- Amazon will invest $20 billion to expand, operate, and maintain its data centres in Australia from 2025 to 2029. The prime minister said some words.
- National Australia Bank (NAB) has paid a record $751,200 in penalties for alleged breaches of Consumer Data Right Rules, “alleged” because an agreement was reached with the ACCC without admission of guilt. This was the maximum penalty which could be imposed.
- Telstra will make its network APIs available for developers, at least in a lab environment on Nokia’s Network as Code platform.
- UNSW researchers are developing a multilingual AI chatbot for use in hospital emergency departments.
- From iTnews, “The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has signed a $70-million deal with Amazon Web Services, bringing the cloud provider’s renegotiated government-wide deal to around $364 million.” Meanwhile from The Mandarin, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is spending $147 million with Amazon.
- Australia’s Ghost Bat military drone has reached a significant milestone, with a single operator controlling two of the MQ-28A aircraft during recent trials.
Elsewhere
- A joint Australian-Thai investigation has taken down a scam centre in Bangkok. “Five Australian citizens, six UK nationals, one Canadian, and one South African were all taken into custody,” reports Cyber Daily.
MUSIC PODCAST SECOND PILOT POSTED: My good friend Snarky Platypus and I have posted the second pilot episode of Another Untitled Music Podcast. Yes, it’s about music. Look for it under that title in your podcast app of choice and let us know what you think.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new yet.
What’s next?
Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 22 July, which is still more than four weeks away.
With Australian politics now well into its traditional winter break, this newsletter will not be published next Friday 27 June. It will return on Friday 4 July
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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