Testing age checks for Oz: Andrew Hammond of KJR talks trust on BU Podcast

It has been one month since Australia brought into effect its prohibition on social media for kids under 16. Initially born from a desire to address harms against girls and women by restricting violent and pornographic content online, Australia’s legislative quest has led to the present moment, wherein nations around the globe are considering emulating its social media law, and its eSafety commissioner faces explicit threats from Washington.

The government’s headline project leading up to what is popularly known as the “under-16 ban” was the Age Assurance Technology Trial, which evaluated a variety of age verification, age estimation and age inference providers to gauge the feasibility of the technology. To lead testing for the project, the AATT enlisted KJR, a Canberra-based software quality assurance consultancy that runs testing across sectors and use cases. KJR provided technical testing and oversaw tests conducted in conjunction with Australian schools. Its neutral eye is key to the trial’s lasting authority.

Andrew Hammond is the director of KJR. In the latest episode of the Biometric Update Podcast, Hammond reflects on the evaluation, and offers his opinion on where the larger age assurance project in Australia stands.

“I think that, being a month in, there’s still a fair bit of refinement to the technology stack to be done, in terms of at what point does someone get challenged for their age,” Hammond says. But, he says, that’s the natural state of things in a world of neverending development.

“Nothing is ever really finished anymore,” he says. “We used to find when we were testing applications that you’d get to the end, you do all the testing and you roll it out to production and then you can kind of sit back and relax for three to six months before you need to do the next iteration. But these days, the way we develop software, we might put out version one of the software and then someone else that we’re interconnected with through APIs or other integrations, they’ll update it and it’ll go to 1.1, and all of a sudden you’re in this spot where your software is never complete”

“So what I would say for age assurance is that it’s only going to get better and better over time.”

Listen now: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Podbean

Runtime: 00:29:55

Article Topics

Age Assurance Technology Trial  |  age inference  |  Australia age verification  |  biometric age estimation  |  biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  KJR Testing