Since Labour is laying the groundwork for an Australia-style social media ban for u16s, it is worth checking how the prototype is going. Less than a year in, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is reporting “major gaps” and a significant data breach has already made the news. Imagine the kind of mess Whitehall could make of this…
How Australia’s u16 ban is going:
- 70,000 ID images stolen in the Discord breach. A hack on third-party support firm 5CA in October 2025 swept up government IDs (passports, driving licences) handed over for age checks. Almost the entire global haul, 68,000 victims, was Australian.
- Hackers published selfies of users holding their IDs as proof of the leak, and claimed 2 million similar images, though Discord disputed the figure. Encouraging…
- The government’s own age-tech trial flagged the risk in advance. The Age Check Certification Scheme found providers were “over-anticipating” regulator demands by quietly building tools to retrace users’ verification steps. Facial recognition was accurate within 18 months only 85% of the time…
- Roughly 7 in 10 under-16s with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok accounts before the ban still had them three months in, per the eSafety Commissioner’s March 2026 compliance report. The most common reason parents gave was the platform hadn’t even asked their child to verify their age.
- VPN downloads “nearly tripled” in the run-up to the ban, according to Reuters. Asked how platforms should block kids using VPNs, the eSafety Commissioner’s office declined to comment. Labour has its sights set on VPNs for a reason. Although tech-savvy kids will inevitably bypass that as well…
Discord has postponed its global age verification rollout to late 2026 after backlash, admitting it “missed the mark“.
The privacy implications of such a ban are enormous. It will be a hacker’s dream…
