The Australian ban on social media is probably unworkable
This post by Neil Brown is a couple of years old now, but he linked to it in the wake of news that the Australian government have announced a ban on social media for under-16s.
As he points out by going through examples, this is entirely unworkable. When I tried to explain this to someone less technical, I realised that unless you enforce biometrics at every login, it’s pretty much impossible to enforce in a good-faith way. And that would be a huge privacy violation of children.
Let’s say that there a multiple countries with similar-but-not-identical laws.
Country A, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country A who are under 21.
Country B, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country B who are under 25.
And Country C, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country C at all.
Assuming that the website operator does not want to shut up shop totally - by applying the most restrictive rule, of Country C, to everyone - and that it does care about the laws in other countries (a big “if”, but it’s my example, so…) how does the website operator establish where the user is located at the point at which they access the site, to know which rule to apply?
tl;dr
I don’t think you can, with any reasonable degree of assurance.
Source: Neil’s blog
Image: julien Tromeur