Australian inventor Ric Richardson says governments can protect children online without collecting vast amounts of personal data or requiring everyone to prove their age. Current age-verification systems risk undermining privacy while failing to keep children off social media.
In an interview with RCR, Richardson said his technology ‘SafeGen’, offers a privacy-preserving alternative to facial scans and digital ID checks, as have been implemented in Australia and are soon to be in New Zealand. SafeGen works by using information already held by telecommunications companies to determine whether a mobile phone account belongs to an adult, without storing personal information or requiring users to submit identity documents.
Richardson said existing age-assurance technologies rely heavily on facial analysis, identity verification, and centralised databases – approaches that are costly, intrusive, and ineffective. “Scanning 26 million people multiple times a year is not cheap,” he said, estimating the cost of such systems in Australia could reach A$800 million annually.
He also questioned the effectiveness of Australia’s under-16 social media restrictions, claiming that between 70% and 80% of children continued to access platforms despite the new measures. Rather than collecting more personal data, Richardson argued that parents should play a greater role in managing children’s online access. He said governments had been too quick to assume age-assurance technologies were the only solution.
With New Zealand signalling it will adopt a similar policy, Richardson urged policymakers to consider alternatives that protect children without creating large databases of sensitive information on all citizens.
“Think beyond age assurance,” he said. “There are ways of doing this without compromising everyone’s privacy.”
Watch RCR’s latest interview with Ric Richardson and an earlier interview from December 2025.
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It was never about protecting the children – it was about the tracking, tracing and total surveillance of the entire population.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lREDv6uU7o
For those calling Labour and co Communists, is what National and co doing any different? Its “globalists” you should be concerned with. Please don’t vote for any of them next election. Try a new reformer party instead. One Nation only got ahead in AU because people woke up and stopped supporting more of the same. Same can be said of the AFD, National Rally and Reform UK.
Maybe the government should just abide by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that it signed.
Under the Convention parents have ultimate responsibility for the upbringing of their children, not the damn government. Children have the right to seek and impart information of any kind, by any means under the same Convention.
If parents don’t want their children accessing social media then don’t buy them a smart phone. For family communication buy them a dumb mobile phone.