The Australian eSafety Commissioner started following my technical work in online child safety at least 10 years ago. She’s unable to answer my constructive criticism on LinkedIn.
If Australian journalists want expert analysis of what’s happening in their country, and why these measures function more effectively as surveillance systems than child safety protections, feel free to get in touch.
If you’re in Australia and want someone to stand up for your human right to privacy and civil liberties, share this and get it in front of journalists.
I can break down every part of what’s happening in plain English, with no jargon, and explain exactly where these systems fail children while working as designed for intelligence analysts, identity verification, monitoring and control.
Australia isn’t the first country to take this approach. The UK introduced default-on pornography filters and broader online child-safety controls in 2012. I was interviewed by BBC Newsnight at the time while advising the British government that its approach was technically flawed.
Back then, I demonstrated on Newsnight how poor parental controls were. They weren’t good enough.
Today they are.
All smartphones now have built-in parental controls that can block apps and websites, limit communications, control purchases and downloads, enforce screen-time limits and manage what children can access on the device.
We had weak parental controls in 2012. We don’t have that excuse anymore.
Labor has buried extraordinary “sock puppet” powers in its proposed internet regime which would give the eSafety Commissioner the power to assume false identities and generate online material using AI.
news24.com.au/politics/austr…