In this episode of Family Matters, Simon talks with Iain Corby, the Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association, and asks whether we can have it all – age verification; big tech accountability; limited government involvement; and privacy.
Iain elaborates on how age can be verified without disclosing identity, shedding light on different technologies used globally, including on-device solutions that enhance privacy. He explains methods like facial age estimation, hand movement analysis, and more.
Iain also discusses digital IDs as well as the legislative landscape, emphasising a light-handed approach by governments and the potential benefits of private sector solutions. In his conversation with Simon, Iain underscores the importance of age verification in creating safer online environments for children, comparing it to real-world age verification standards, and expressing the hope that New Zealand will adopt advanced, privacy-preserving solutions learned from other countries.
If you are someone currently engaging in the debate around under 16 year olds accessing social media, or the wider discussion of digital IDs, this is the podcast for you.
Show transcript auto-generated by Descript app:
Simon O’Connor: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. In the show, we are going back towards the United Kingdom to talk actually about age verification and age estimation. And we’re actually, I’m just going to bring our guest in first. His name is Iain Corby and the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association.
So first and foremost, Iain, welcome.
Iain Corby: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Simon O’Connor: Look, thank you for coming on. As many of our viewers will know age verification, particularly for under 16 year olds has been debated, and you’ll know it better than I do around the world and the globe, but we are discussing it here in New Zealand at the moment.
MP’s bill is being pulled out of the ballot. And so the debate is raging. And I thought, why not go to someone who actually knows a lot about age verification and what it can and cannot? Do hence your good self. So thank you for making the time. First and foremost give us a quick introduction of your good self because amongst other things, you’re chairing this association.
I see you trained at Balliol College at Oxford and what the association does.
Iain Corby: Yes. I did my degree there in politics, philosophy and economic Economics or PPE. Which is actually sometimes called pretty poor education. It’s certainly not an education for a technologist. I’m not qualified in the tech in any way, shape or form, I have to say.
But I have picked it up in the last six years since I’ve been running the trade association for age verification providers. We started with six members who used to meet in the pub and we’ve now graduated to having 34 members from around the world. So it’s very much a virtual organization. And, our mission is to make the internet age aware.
And here’s the cru crucial thing. It’s age aware, not identity aware. So the essence of age verification is proving your age online without disclosing your identity. And, we started by doing that in a very simple way because back in 2017, the UK was going to bring in some legislation under what they call the Digital Economy Act to require age verification for adult websites.
So pornography and those adult sites thought nobody’s going to trust us with their passport. We need to find a better way of doing this. And so they encouraged, in fact, the creation of these third party websites. That would be the place you go to prove your age. And then those websites would just in turn tell the adult sites yes or no, nothing else.
Are you over 18? Are you not over 18? And that’s really how it started. So that’s how we ended up with a, an industry which was entirely devoted to the anonymous proof of your age,
Simon O’Connor: Which seems to be coming, almost needed everywhere. Now it’s not simply pornographic sites or gambling sites or accessing social media.
The need to have some sense of a person’s age is near ubiquitous. And I see from your website with those 30 group, you’ve got some of the big players involved here. So we’re not talking any slugs in this space. It’s people who know what they’re doing. The first question, and you touched on it, is age verification doesn’t need to be identity.
Verification and that certainly seems to be a confusion here in New Zealand that any information we hand across to the government or to Meta or Google somehow is going to compromise my entire identity. And I think you are saying that’s not the case, or it doesn’t have to be the case?
Iain Corby: No. And I’m not saying that every one of our members does it in this perfect way, but let me just give you a description of how you can do it.
So it is in theory possible to take your mobile phone to scan a copy of your driver’s license or your passport just into an app on your phone to then take a selfie using your phone for the app to compare your image to the image on that passport to read your date of birth, and then for the phone to merely send a signal that says, the user who’s using me as a phone right now is over 18.
And in that process, we didn’t send a copy of your face. We didn’t send a copy of your passport, not even to the cloud to be processed. It could all be done entirely on your device. Now that’s probably the leading-edge solutions these days. But even when it does happen on the cloud, what we say is we will always immediately delete your personal data as soon as it’s been used.
So as soon as we figured out you are over 16 or 18, or whatever the legal age is that we’re looking for, we don’t need to keep that data anymore. And under, I think we were broadly speaking, born in Europe where we have strict data protection laws, as you’ll know. And unless you have a justification to retain data, then legally you’re not allowed to do and so what we call data minimization has to be applied. Now there’s obviously different ways of doing age verification, so there are some ways which people might be more comfortable with anyway, that, one of the great new inventions is finger movements. And this is where you just asked to make certain shapes with your hand.
Now that is 97% accurate. In distinguishing between people who are over or under a particular age, and in fact, because they want to prove that it’s genuinely anonymous. If you put your head in the same picture as they’re analysing the hand. Then it stops the process and says no, we don’t want to see your face, we just want to see your hand.
And I even challenged them to say can they read your fingerprints, because I knew somebody would just object on that basis. And they don’t even use a good enough quality picture that they could find those fingerprints. So that’s one option. But equally, you could, if you are, if you’re comfortable, you could just give us your mobile phone number or your email address. And again, a third party will check how you’ve used that. Not many eight year olds are using their email address to check mortgage interest rates, for example. So if you’ve used your email address for lots of adult kind of things, then we get a good picture that you are likely to be an adult.
And again, having established that, delete the email address and just say to the third party, to the, the social media site, this person’s over 16 or whatever the ages you’re testing for. We’ve got facial age estimation as well. This one causes a lot of confusion. In Australia, your colleagues over the water there somebody set this hair running that, because age estimation based on your face was not good enough to be able to tell that today is your 16th birthday. Then the entire project was flawed because it wasn’t accurate enough. Now, we have never claimed that a facial age estimation can be anything more than say, one to two years on average, right? So it will be over overall or under by a couple of years.
So we would only ever use a facial age estimation for somebody as old as me. Who is clearly over 16, and you create what we call a buffer age. So a gap between the legal age and the age you test for using the estimation. Now, sadly, if you’re below that buffer age, you’re going to have to find a better way of proving your age.
So if you want to celebrate your 16th birthday by, by opening a TikTok account or a SNAP account, then we’re going to have to find solutions in New Zealand. Where you could go and get that date of birth. But it is there. So there’s one of our newest members is called My Mahi. They’re based in New Zealand.
They have a lot of, they do a lot of work with schools. They give kids in schools digital IDs on their phones. So obviously they have access to data from the schools with everybody’s actual date of birth. They can do you an age check using your My Mahi account. And then again, just send that data minimized signal.
To the website to say this person is over 16, they’re old enough to have a social media account. So there’s a whole range of estimation and verification techniques that we can use, which in combination, trying to, essentially trying to do it with as minimal impact on the user as possible, and we do what we call successive validation.
So we try one thing and if that doesn’t work, we try another, we might then need to ask you to provide some evidence, we build it up. Until we’ve established your, that you are old enough to access that site.
Simon O’Connor: I actually think it’s in a remarkable array of technologies. I was talking to someone the other day who mentioned the use of hands, I must admit, I was expecting somehow it could work on the wrinkles. But you are saying it’s actually they’ve worked out well. This provider, this group, has worked out a way of actual hand signals
Iain Corby: Based on medical evidence. And so it turns out that the development of the tendons and the way your hand moves is very sensitive in that sort of age between 10 and 30.
And so they had a lot of medical. They were actually looking to spot people who are taking performance, enhancing drugs in athletics, and that was why they set the project up. I don’t know whether they managed to find out whether they were taking the drugs or not, but they accidentally stumbled upon the fact that this technology could tell you the age with really amazing.
Simon O’Connor: So that would fall into the age estimation side of things, wouldn’t it? As would the facial recognition actually, sorry, I’ve probably the wrong term. It’s not facial recognition. It’s looking at the nature of your face and making the determination. That’s the estimation side.
Iain Corby: That’s an important point. That’s, I always try not to correct people in life, but the one thing we always have to correct is the recognition versus the estimation. You to do a facial recognition, you need a huge amount of data about an individual to uniquely identify that individual. When we’re doing a facial estimation, we just use a few data points to do effectively a mathematical map of your face.
How far is your nose from your ear lobe? To be honest, we don’t know what the numbers are because AI is all a bit of a mystery black box. But what I can tell you is if you got access to those numbers, it would never be enough to re-identify an individual and absolutely not enough to create a photograph of them.
So even at the point that we started to process the age calculation, we can no longer figure out who you are. This is what I mean about privacy by design and data minimization every step of the way. We’ve designed these solutions to protect people’s anonymity. I will always say. The own hackable database is no database at all.
Yeah, and sensible business people recognize the enormous risks there are in keeping data. And the, your best advice is don’t collect it in the first place. Hence, do it on the device if you can, and if you have to collect it, get rid of it as quickly as possible. Hence our, immediate deletion possibility.
And we have written international standards with the International Standards Organization, the ISO it’s called 27566. It actually just became an official standard this month. And you can be audited and certified by independent auditors. Who will confirm that you meet those standards.
And that’s not even really about the level of accuracy in the age. It’s much more about your data privacy and your data security provisions and how well documented the way you’ve configured your systems are. And we would always advise regulators to require. Platforms use certified solutions.
because then the regulator doesn’t have to get worried about delving into the technology and testing it. They can just check. You’ve got that audit certification.
Simon O’Connor: So it strikes me this could be quite a light hand by government because certainly the concerns down here, and I’m sure it was the same in the UK and Aussie and elsewhere, that, to do age verification or estimation.
Although we talk mainly about verification down here, confusing the two, particularly around technologies for under 16 year olds. So again, social media, accessing pornography and so forth. There’s a real worry. About governments having to control it. We already have a system. You would’ve come across it during your visit called Real me.
It’s where we verify who we are to the government departments, to our postal service. It’s where we get our passports and our, and I think a lot of people are thinking government needs to set up. A digital id where it controls enormous amounts of data about us. And that seems to freak a lot of people out, I think, understandably.
But listening to you and it sounds like there can be quite a light handed approach. Government needs to be involved around that certification. But actually it’s up to in effect corporates agencies, other associations to actually, I don’t know, come up with the technology. I’m not articulating that very well.
Iain Corby: No, you are. I’m very familiar; the DIA’s done a lot of work. You’ve got quite a sophisticated trust framework for the digital identity scheme and the verification services, which are licensed and certified by the government there. So it’s understandable that there might be some tendency within government to assume you just use that existing identity system.
In fact, we’re going through the very same controversy here in the UK where we have a lot of private sector identity providers and the government has just announced it intends to bring in its own government issued mandatory digital identity. And it’s caused, 3 million people have signed a petition here.
Against that, which is an unheard of number in this country opposing a policy. And a lot of that is about fears about government surveillance. So the benefit I think of using private providers to do this. Identity, or in this case today we’re talking about h verification is you can choose one that you trust.
So there may be brands within Australia that you, sorry, within New Zealand, that you are more willing to trust with your data. You believe them when they say they’re going to delete that data straight away, for example. Now there’s nothing wrong with using your real. Identity as the source of data.
In the same way as I was saying earlier, you might use a passport or a driver’s license. We could log into that real me thing and get them to give the age verification provider your date of birth, but that would be the last time that the government was involved in the process. And you therefore break that.
It’s quite interesting if you look in France or Italy who are perhaps even more concerned about privacy than anywhere else they’ve put a requirement in for what we call zero knowledge, proof and double blind solutions. Now that’s using cryptography to essentially make it technically impossible for either the website or the platform you are trying to get into, to figure out the identity of the user.
Or for the age verification provider to know which platform the user is going to when they prove their age. So this was, again, very much in the world of adult services where people are very sensitive about what their favourite site is. They might have a certain peccadillo, shall we say, that they don’t want people to know about.
So what we don’t want to do is build up a long list of all the websites that you go to. Which would be effectively a blackmailers charter particularly if it might be somebody high profile, for example, so hence that double blind approach. And we can do that technology is available.
We also are now just launching interoperable solutions where having done one age check to get onto one platform, you can say, okay, I’m happy to now keep a digital token, a signed token on your device. Which for a certain period of time will tell any other platform you go to that you are over 16.
Saving you the need to repeat this process for every social media site that you wish to access and some people might have 3, 4, 5 different social media sites, so it depends obviously on the legislation. I was really surprised when I came to New Zealand a couple of years ago on my first visit, that essentially there’s very little online safety legislation at all in New Zealand at this point in time.
There was just the beginnings of concerns around, how do we stop child sexual abuse material? Tying into the Internet Watch Foundation and having these hash lists of obviously stuff that needs to be blocked for all the right reasons, but we weren’t getting involved in questions around data, child data protection or Yeah.
Adult content. Or certainly not, social media. And so I do hope that New Zealand will. Catch up, but also perhaps have what we might call second mover advantage. In other words, you can look over at what’s happened in the UK, in, in the EU, and obviously across the Tasmanian Straits, and see what the Aussies are doing, and learn from everybody else’s mistakes and be the sort of second wave that comes in and does this right.
And, we are doing our best to be available to all the relevant. Legislators and regulators to, to provide them with the advice on how we would do it if we were given the opportunity to share our expertise.
Simon O’Connor: Which is why I was pleased that you were down here engaging, because I think a lot of this is a mystery to New Zealanders.
I can’t speak on behalf of all and everyone, here at Family First, as we pursue the issue and try to get our heads around it, we’re struck by a lot of people are concerned, but often for reasons they don’t fully understand or. Or comprehend, they, they would perceive that any attempt to age verify is going to take basically all and every bit of data about them and compromise who they are.
Now, of course, that’s feasible, but you are saying quite clearly actually there’s a whole array of technologies already existing around the world. And it would be my hoping and actually that Kiwis would take that second mover advantage because we like to try and recreate the wheel down here, but there’s so much being done around the globe.
Iain Corby: And if I may, one thing we jumped straight into – the technology and the privacy, which is important, but let’s just go back a step, shall we? We would never dream of allowing our kids to go into the high street downtown and walk into a strip club or a casino, or a bar without somebody challenging them to check their age.
Yet in the online world, we haven’t done that. And I, we, the internet wasn’t designed with children in mind. And I think we will look back in 10 years time at what we exposed our kids to online, whether that’s adult content or just the sort of the deeply addictive behaviour. Watching a webinar in the US with Jonathan Haidt, who’s written a book about this, which has just, been really important in.
Setting the tone of the debate just about the terrible impact it’s having on children, just in terms of the amount of time they spend playing with their friends because it’s, the addiction to this online world has eaten into their free time. And I think all we are trying to do here is to apply the same norms of society that exist in the real world to that online world.
And by the way, we can do it in an even more privacy preserving way than when you walk into a bar because you may show your driver’s license. To the guy on the door and that would include your full name, your actual date of birth, maybe, I don’t know if your address is shown on your driver’s license in New Zealand, but they’re getting all that and certainly in this country, sometimes people even take photographs of it.
So they have the evidence that they checked your ID at the door. All we share, even in that real circumstance, if you’re using your phone, it’s just a yes, this person is over 18. Indication with none of that other data shared at all. because you don’t need to, the barman doesn’t need to know your name.
He just needs to know that you’re over the legal age to buy a drink. And so that’s what we’ve been able to apply in both the online and the offline world. When you’ve used the benefit of a digital proof of age.
Simon O’Connor: I’m glad you’re bringing up what I call the paradox because we already share, I think, enormous amounts of information. You great example there. You go to the bar. Gosh, even when I go to the supermarket at my age and they still want, someone’s got to come and look at me and say, he’s not under 18. And we just accept that here in New Zealand about the time you were here, they were introducing, age verification around online gambling and no one’s blinked, deny and yet somehow when it comes to this discussion, and I’m not trying to draw you too much into the political side, but under sixteens or the internet, social media people losing their minds on it. And it for me is quite a paradox.
Iain Corby: Yeah, you’re right. So first of all, I would say with gambling it tends to be an identity check. You can gamble anonymously, but it’s very hard to make any money out of it because you won’t get your winnings. That tends to be sitting just more on the identity side than the age side.
But if we turn back to the more serious point there’s been a lot of, complaining from the social media sites in Australia about just how hard this is going to be for them to take the kids under 16 off their platforms. They know within at most six weeks of you using a social media account.
A huge amount about you and almost the first thing they know about you in this is your age. So what we’ll see in Australia, and I’m sure this would be the same in New Zealand, is they will do a first pass just based on the information they already have to. People who they know for certain they’re under 16, they’ve got to come off, perhaps they, signed up with their real age when they open the accounts so they know that they’re under 16.
And then there’ll be another group of people who, their own internal records, which they use all the time for sending you adverts for things that you might be interested in. They’ll use that to remove then, and then the next tranche of people. Now some of these will be wrongly removed and they will have the opportunity to then, use one of these verification methods I’ve talked about, or even an estimation.
My grandma might be accidentally thrown off. She could just use a facial age estimation or the fingers solution to get back on that would be fine, but others might need to use a verification. And then going forward, of course, we’re going to have to check every new account because you won’t have that six weeks of information.
So you will need to check, and one that we call them phoenix accounts that rise from the ashes. Because you could kick some kid off because they’re 15 and then they think they’re smart, so they just, get a new email address and try and reopen an account and lie about their age.
So for those, essentially that’s the reason you’d need to check every new account more effectively. As, again, with an estimation, if it’s somebody claiming to be over 2021 or with a verification, if they’re in that marginal error area between 16 and 20 or something.
Simon O’Connor: Yeah, I was talking to someone recently who’s relatively knowledgeable, but not necessarily an expert, had said a lot of these social media companies, like a Meta, Google would have over 90 data points on most of us already.
A phenomenal amount of information, which they’re already using. Iain as, as everyone knows to target us, you go into a web search for the Cook Islands and within seconds my social media’s feed is filled with it. And so it, it can be, I suppose one of the big questions, and whether it’s answerable, is why the big tech companies like the Matters, and those are so resistant because actually the technology’s there.
You’ve got 30 groups in your association who are doing this, and yet there doesn’t seem to be that embrace yet.
Iain Corby: I’ve got a theory, I’ve got a theory about that, which is when these. Platforms were growing very fast and they made the announcement, they’d hit their first million users or their first billion UU users.
It would then be really awkward, embarrassing to go back and say, oh, sorry, we thought we had a billion users. But we’re now going to have to say we’ve only got 750 million. because we had to kick off a quarter of them because they turned out to. Too young to use our platform and I think one of the real dangers has been if the minimum age in the terms and conditions has been 13 and everybody’s essentially been lying to say they’re 13, even if they’re, I think 8% of eight year olds have social media accounts in surveys in the uk.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be much different in New Zealand. They’ve all lied and they’ve made themselves look 3, 4, 5 years older than they really are. And that means that those platforms then believe you’ve turned 18, three or four or five years too soon. And so at that point you are then exposed to all the adult stuff.
For example, dating you, you lose all the protections that these companies say. They give children anyway, for example, stopping strangers, meeting up with you online and so on. Because it’s assumed you’ve got to 18 prematurely. And that’s actually the real danger about not doing proper age verification, that whether it’s 13 or were it to come in 15 or 16, whatever age New Zealand would go for.
Yeah, I have to say. I think a general ban on social media is a very extreme response. And I think it’s, I think it’s probably the social media companies have got themselves to blame because they have not made the effort to introduce proper age verification and then to ensure that everybody is getting an age appropriate experience with those additional protections and I imagine this may prompt them to rethink their business models and then to come back to government and try to offer.
Social media platforms that are safe for 13 year olds, or frankly, I think they, you could have a social media platform that’s safe for a 7-year-old, but the point is you must design it right from the start with a 7-year-old in mind. Not create something that’s designed to addict adults to your site, and then just give it to to, to young kids because that’s just irresponsible.
Simon O’Connor: Yeah, some of the various advocates I’ve been talking to, particularly in the United States are arguing, safe design needs to be integrated from day one and says me, there’s a few steps I see Instagram has made some changes down here in New Zealand and which is a positive step, but there’s still so much more that can be done.
And I have to say, I hadn’t conceptualized. The pipeline that you just touched on. In other words, when someone mis identifies themself, that’s obviously one point, but as you say, three, four years down the track, they’re now being exposed, which I suppose, and it’s probably more a legal question, but I’ve been struck.
As an adult, like yourself, whenever we sign up to some Apple or got even to Apple or whatever, you’ve got pages and pages of terms and conditions, a contract, which none of us ever read. We just get to the bottom and accept. There must be a question in play here. These young ones who are signing a contract with these big companies, which are invalid from the start.
A child, someone under 16. Someone under 18 really can’t consent to these things.
Iain Corby: Yeah I must admit, I’m not an expert on New Zealand law in this area, but generally, gaming companies who have kids who spend, thousands of dollars on, buying cash for the games to buy skins and guns and different things that they can do within the game environment.
Often this platforms, the gaming platforms, find they’re unenforceable. When the parent sees the credit card bill and calls up and says, this is outrageous, they have to refund them because actually they’ve got no legal leg to stand on. Likewise, with signing up to terms and conditions, you in effect, it’s signing a contract.
And in most jurisdictions, you can’t sign contracts under particular ages. And that does vary by jurisdiction. I wouldn’t know what the specifics are. In New Zealand, in the US they’re very focused on 18. They have an app store accountability act that a number of states starting with Utah have passed, which is going to require that you have parental consent to download any app.
That’s, it’s a slightly different measure. It’s dealing with a slightly different problem. But we, we’ve been supportive of that concept as well. Although it’s going to, I think it, it’s going through the courts in the US because obviously the first Amendment on free speech Yeah.
Can make things a bit more difficult there when it comes to legislating New Zealand. Legislators have a much clearer pitch to operate on. They can just look at this problem and decide what they think is right now. So whether that’s just copying the Australians exactly, or something a bit more nuanced we’ll we, we can wait and see what we will get from Australia.
And I’m really glad that Julie Inman Grant, who’s the eSafety Commissioner there, has committed to this. Is a very good before and after analysis of the impact of their social media delay as they’re calling it. And they’ve got some academics involved in doing that because I’m sure personally I think you will see test scores improve.
You will see kids behaving better in schools. You will see perhaps bullying and wellbeing improved, but you’ve got to look at the other side of the coin as well. And I think we shouldn’t be. Ignore the arguments that say there are benefits to the networking and the education that is available to kids through the power of the internet.
And for children these days, the internet is social media. They do not type www dot on their keyboard. They’d look at us like we are aliens if we started talking about that. So I think it’s going to be an interesting social experience in Australia. Part of that second mover advantage will be to look at what the benefits were in Australia, but also to perhaps look at some of those drawbacks and see if you can be a bit more nuanced in the, in, in the approach that you take in New Zealand.
Simon O’Connor: It’s certainly my view as a non-academic and just someone who has opinions it will make an impact. We, was it a year and a half ago cell phones for example, were banned in school. And the teachers are reporting anecdotally at this point improvement. And as you say, you mentioned Jonathan Haidt earlier.
We actually had him over for our conference a year and a half ago. And was just very struck.
Iain Corby: Oh, wow. Okay. Great.
Simon O’Connor: Yeah, he was he’s very articulate and as he says, we worry about our kids outside on the playground and stranger danger, and yet we hand them a technological device, which gives them the entire world.
But a big part of what he was saying and why I’m really. And was keen to talk with you. Is he talked about a collective response, individual parents trying their best. He would argue he’s going to fail. because if I keep the phone away from my kids, they’re going to be, if you will, bullied or pressured by other kids.
Whereas if everyone’s in the same space, it gets a lot easier. None of the kids will be accessing technology sorry, that’s the wrong phrase. Social media if they’re eight or. Or nine, which really comes right back to where we started this age identification. And I just love the first example that you gave and I’ll start wrapping up because I’m very conscious of your time and time zones you mentioned.
And I think it’s probably good to reinforce to people where literally just using your phone doesn’t go to the cloud. Your, you take a, you explained it that you take a photo of your passport and then of your face.
Iain Corby: Yeah. Everything can be done locally. Everything can be done locally in an app on your device.
The other great option is a reusable digital identity. We’ve got a couple of companies – Yoti, Luciditi – provide you an app, which is a digital id. Again, you can just choose to selectively disclose only the fact that you are over a certain age from your digital identity, which you are entirely in control of.
That would probably be a similar approach to the one that the government might want to take with the Real Me option. But again, people would potentially prefer to use the private sector and to a company they trust rather than getting too close to government in that. Likewise you can do the facial age estimation entirely on device.
So a company called Privately has shrunk the software down to such a small size that you can fit it onto. The average smartphone. So then again your image doesn’t need to go up to the cloud to be estimated or even that map of the image I was talking about, which is at the same time not even sensitive personal data any longer in legal terms because it, it doesn’t identify you.
Simon O’Connor: This is why it’s been so good to chat with you. Obviously your knowledge and advocacy in this space just opens many doors and windows and I think for me it breaks down a number of the stereotypes and misconceptions which are out there. because I think a lot of people hear age verification.
They then go digital id government, which is hoovering up enormous amounts of your. Data and you’ve clearly, to me at least, and all those who are listening will say, actually there are an array of technologies not only in the private sector, but as you say, can just exist on your phone. They’re not going into any sort weird space.
And actually it is quite selective. And again, I, when I was reading your website, you made a real. Distinction that this is not identity. We’re talking age verification, which is distinct from identity identification, which is one very awkward sentence. Yeah.
Iain Corby: The whole essence of the essence of age assurance is proving your age without disclosing your identity.
There’s an entire identity provider industry out there around the world. It’s much bigger than my little, tiny part of the world. Our sector’s very small, but it also means that we’re under enormous scrutiny from data protection authorities around the world. They know where to go to check that we’re looking after your data properly.
And frankly, one of the things that came out here in the UK was a few, maybe 250,000 extra people started downloading VPNs to pretend that they weren’t in the UK because they were. Suspicious about age verification and maybe they were worried about their data. The irony was using a VPN is probably a much higher risk way of, getting onto the internet than going through any sort of age verification process because a lot of those VPNs are actually associated with Chinese parent companies,
Simon O’Connor: and they’re hoovering up your data in the background. Look, absolutely. Which …
Iain Corby: if it’s free, you are paying for it some other way.
Simon O’Connor: Oh, absolutely. And again, these are the insights and again, I’m glad you’re sharing them, that people need to hear because I think there’s a lot of not really misinformation down here in New Zealand. Just a misunderstanding.
Iain I’m so grateful for your time. If people want to know more about the Age Verification Providers Association where do they jump on the web? We’ll show our ages by saying www dot.
Iain Corby: Yeah, you, I think you can probably just start with https://avpassociation.com/ and it will still get you there. So age verification providers, https://avpassociation.com/.
Simon O’Connor: Brilliant. Hey, Iain, thank you so much for your time. And look, thanks for the advocacy and obviously the promotion that you are doing and just again, helping us and all our viewers and listeners to understand a little bit more about this space.
Iain Corby: Yeah I hope I managed to find an excuse to come back to New Zealand and help with the implementation of this once the laws are passed.
Simon O’Connor: We’d always love to have you down here, new Zealanders love people visiting and certainly from the UK. So know that you’ll be very welcome and again, thanks for your time.
Iain Corby: You’re welcome. Thank you.
