Frequently asked questions
On 1 May 2024, the Australian Government announced an age assurance trial to examine options to protect children from harmful content such as pornography and other online age-restricted services, as well as harms on social media. The trial has a number of components that will ultimately informGovernment decision making.
The Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts is responsible for implementing the trial.
The technical trial is one component of the wider age assurance trial, which will conduct an independent technical trial and assessment of age assurance technologies to evaluate their effectiveness, maturity, and readiness for use in the Australian context.
The trial will not build any age assurance or child safeguarding technology. It is not designed to advocate for any particular policy positions relating to age assurance.
Age assurance is the broadest term used to describe a process to establish confidence in the age or age-range of a user to check if they meet the requirements for an age-related restriction.
The trial outputs are not aimed at producing a government endorsement for, or procurement of, a single product, technology or technologies. Rather, information about the assessed efficacy of each technology will inform advice to Government and eSafety on implementation of industry codes and policy development to safeguard children online.
We have a Stakeholder Advisory Board chaired by Jon Rouse APM, Professor AiLECS Labs at Monash University, which will meet every 6 weeks on average during the trial.
There are four engagement events for stakeholders during the project.
- Project Launch, Project Plan, Initial Engagement, Website, Openness & Transparency, Public Confidence and Trust – during November, 2024.
- Stakeholder Engagement, particularly trial participants, understanding the approaches to evaluation, setting expectations for effort for trial participants, timetable, explaining how to participate during January, 2025.
- Preliminary Report, key initial outcomes from the trial outcomes, identification of opportunities for remedial evaluation – during April, 2025.
- Trial conclusion, final stakeholder event, report publication, project review and evaluation, stakeholder feedback – during June, 2025.
There is an open invitation to suppliers of age assurance solutions and the platforms which may adopt age assurance technology to participate in the trial. We will publish a list of participating organisations once they have all been selected.
Participation in the trial is entirely voluntary, both for those who wish to submit a method of age assurance for testing, and for those invited to help conduct the testing as trial users.
We have a rigorous process in place to manage conflict of interest, which is a standard requirement for all government-approved Conformity Assessment Bodies. You can read more about this here.
The trial is being led by an independent Conformity Assessment Body, approved by the UK Accreditation Service, which is itself a government body. In addition, the Trial has appointed an independent reviewer of its testing, Professor Tony Walsh.
There is no general requirement on the public to be involved in the trial or share any persona data with us or the participants.
We are working with a specialist company to find a representative sample of Australians who will be invited to help conduct the tests. They will need to give informed consent to share their personal data, and will be given a full briefing on the trial and how their data will be used.
