"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."

Careful wording there. "substantial" and "prevent" are load bearing.

"We found a plethora of approaches that fit different use cases in different ways, but we did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments."

They're trying to suggest that some combination of different tools used in different ways and contexts will work. In theory.

Jon Rouse from the advisory board is being polite, using phrases such as "robust discussion" and being clear that they did not have input into the prelim results, were not asked to endorse them, etc.

Sounds like they have tried to provide good advice along the way and been ignored.

Q re the ABC article yesterday that seems to contradict these results. They dodge and say that it was based on testing data from a month or two ago, and that the ABC hasn't seen the final testing data (and nor has anyone else).

But largely avoids answering the question.

Q: impact on small business.

Answer was a weird thing about "if you're a small business selling knives, you should have to take precautions against selling weapons" or something. What?

I asked about the discrepancy between vendors collecting too much data and building tools for law enforcement, "We found robust understanding of and internal policy decisions regarding, the handling of personal information by trial participants."

The answer did not inspire confidence that they understand the risks here.

I also asked what has changed since the Australian Government response to the Roadmap for Age Verification found that "Age assurance technologies cannot yet meet all these requirements" for age assurance to be effective.

The dude did not appear to be familiar with this document or the underlying Roadmap, which is a concern.

It was handwaving about "technology changes quickly" and something a bit mansplainey, quite frankly, that assumed I was not knowledgeable about technology generally and this field specifically.

That is a… bold choice.

In summary, the trial is a farce. It's testing a few things that might be sort of interesting, but not testing a lot of the things that will actually matter.

And they don't appear to understand some of the important issues around privacy and security, but they mistakenly believe they do.

There is a pre-determined outcome and they are trying to find a way to write something that looks like it justifies that outcome, provided you turn your head sideways, squint and don't think about anything very much.

@daedalus thank you for this report, incredibly thought-provoking

did i get this right, the whole thing is a customer acquisition campaign by for-profit ‘age verification’ companies?

@airshipper @daedalus The whole thing seemed to start from a big campaign by (Mr. Murdoch’s) Daily Telegraph, when exactly nobody else was asking for it. I never followed that so not sure why exactly they were pushing so hard for it but you can guess at some likely explanations.

Through the process, basically none of the child safety experts said a blanket ban was a good policy but the Government had surveyed a few dozen parents and decided from that that everybody in Australia supported this idea to “save the children” and that it must be done… It was honestly super weird…

So maybe the for-profit entities are just taking advantage of it, or maybe there was collusion from the start.