So what do you think of the new legislation?

Yeah.

It's, it's really interesting.

It has a lot of really good innovations and, um, you know, a duty to act responsibly for social media platforms and for, uh, AI chatbot o- operators.

Um, but as you mentioned, there's a social media ban that's kind of, like, involved.

Uh, it applies to a very small slice, um, not only of features, uh, but also it's, it's only relevant for account, uh, creation, so, um, you know, uh, and, and it doesn't ban young people from accessing the, the sites and platforms to just scroll through content.

So I, I think that it's a partial, uh, ban.

Yeah

Can you talk a bit about what using that lens rather than the privacy and security lens, which tends to be the first stop for people talking about age assurance or age gating, you know, what, what, what's being missed by the privacy and security perspective that, that looking at this through the perspective that you brought really, uh, really brings?

brings?Yeah, uh, thank you for that question.

Yeah, it was an opportunity to go back and look at the, at the submission that we had written as well, uh, which, yeah, as you mentioned, is two years ago now.

So it's, it's been a while, but it still, it still holds, and it was kind of interesting to see the OPC, uh, put out their, you know, finally kind of like their, their decisions about what the guidelines are gonna be for age assurance.

Um, so yeah, it's definitely back on the radar now because it's such a huge part of social media ban discourse, like how will these be implemented? For thinking about it from a children's rights perspective is one way of kind of bringing in some of the nuance that children themselves would bring if we were consulting with them, uh, on, on what, what the benefits and, and problems are, because it requires us to consider multiple angles.

Like, when we're thinking about taking away access, it can't be reduced to just safety versus privacy or security versus privacy.

We also have to consider things like do they have the right to information? They do.

Can you talk about, uh, what that might look like and why that might be a better approach in terms of trying to deal with some of the, the concerns that arise in this online environment?