What the Government’s Own Trial Told Us About Age Assurance.
The U16 Social Media Ban has been sold as a child safety measure. But here’s the truth: Parliament passed the law months before Australians ever saw the results of the Government’s own Age Assurance Technology Trial.
When the final report was released in September 2025, it confirmed what many feared — there is no safe, accurate or fair way to enforce this law.
What Was the Trial?
The Department of Infrastructure and the eSafety Commissioner tested whether age assurance systems could reliably tell if a user was under or over 16.
The methods trialled included:
Document-based checks – uploading passports, driver’s licences or Medicare details.
Biometric systems – facial recognition and age-estimation scans.
Third-party verification – outsourcing checks to commercial providers.
What They Found
The Government’s own report made it clear: none of these options are safe or reliable.
Accuracy problems – facial recognition misclassified teens and misread people from diverse backgrounds.
Privacy risks – ID uploads create exposure to data breaches, hacks and commercial misuse.
Accessibility gaps – many families, especially those without passports or driver’s licences, would be excluded.
Accountability issues – handing over biometric and ID data to third-party companies risks offshoring or commercial exploitation.
In short: the very systems this law depends on don’t work in practice.
Why Pass the Law First?
That’s the critical question. Parliament pushed the U16 Ban through in September 2024, before the trial results were even released to the public.
Submissions to the Senate inquiry closed in just one day, and the bill was rushed through the next. Australians were denied the chance to scrutinise the findings before the law was on the books.
When the trial finally saw daylight, it showed what many already suspected: the technology is flawed, unsafe and unfair. Yet the law stands.
What This Means for Australians
The Age Assurance Trial proves the U16 Ban is built on shaky ground. It:
Will not deliver safety for children – the tools are inaccurate and unreliable.
Puts families at risk – sensitive data in the hands of global platforms and third-party vendors.
Excludes vulnerable Australians – especially those without formal ID or digital access.
And yet, every Australian will be forced through these systems just to get online.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t just a story about child safety. It’s a story about trust, accountability and democracy. A law was rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny, before its own evidence base was made public — and the evidence turned out to be damning.
The bottom line: the Government’s own trial showed age assurance doesn’t work. But instead of listening, Canberra passed the law anyway. That should concern every Australian.
👉 Read our full submission to Parliament and add your voice before this law embeds itself further.