To ensure compliance with upcoming Australian government regulations, Chinwag services qualifying as “social media” will have a minimum age restriction of 18 years for account holders, going forward. A verification process may be required for new accounts on creation, or retroactively for existing accounts if flagged. We will be working with a number of third-party age verification partners to implement our processes, many of whom have been operating in this space for a very long time.
If your account with a Chinwag service is flagged for verification, we are going to need you to bring us a bottle of gin (henceforth referred to as a “verification token” or “token”).
As the supply and sale of alcohol in Australia is well regulated and familiar to most citizens, we expect that this will pose a minimum of technical challenge to our users. Any of our age verification partners (such as Dan Murphy’s) will be more than capable of validating any person as over the age of 18 years and should have a readily available supply of verification tokens acceptable to Chinwag Communications, the possession of which will be considered as evidence that the account holder is a legal adult.
This is satire I presume from the jokiness of the whole thing, but being able to obtain a token in person by just showing an ID (without any storage of data) would be a less intrusive method then the “have your ID and/or face collected and stored for an undisclosed period of time” approach. The latter of which has very obvious privacy and security risks.