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Age Verification for Steam rolls out in Australia requiring a Credit Card
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
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This is fucked. I don’t have a steam account, but my kids do.
Two of the three are 18+, but don’t have a credit card. I do, but obviously they can’t link mine.
Notwithstanding that the age verification laws are performative bullshit, how the fuck is it reasonable to only accept one form of ID that is not universally accepted? If you are going to force this shit onto people, at least mandate a wide variety of acceptable ID’s. For example, in Australia, you can get an 18+ card.
Also, don’t fuck the web for the kids and then exclude the kids.
What alternative do they have? There's no fucking way I am presenting my ID to any website/online service. It's bad enough when a credit card gets leaked online at least you can change your CC number. The Australian government isn't going to pay for cosmetic surgery when your biometrics get leaked, and they will only cover the bare minimum in terms of the disruption when your Drivers License leaks. I trust Steam would at least three quarters arse their data security but the companies they end up dealing with to do local verifications... Pfft assume they follow a Swiss cheese model for data security practices and you are still giving them too much credit.
Government could do something about that, but they won't. Make the ID verification companies pay to change every bit of compromised info (they leak someone's home address they have to pay for a new house on top of getting the maximum fine for each individual breach, I think it's $850k per breach).
The government should have hit that Discord breach that happened around when the age verification laws came into effect with the maximum fine when they had a few thousand IDs insecurely stored $8.5 billion would have sent a clear message, of course it would have also led to zero compliance from every other social media company with their bullshit laws which is why they wouldn't then and they won't now.
So we get the worst of both worlds, the government shoving this bullshit through on one hand but having no interest in mandating proper data security on the other. It's just going to lead to Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft getting more personally identifying data they "grudgingly" hoover up, and them being willing to share it with all the governments of the world as the quid pro quo.
I almost hope to see a few politicians and their immediate family get details leaked so they understand how fucked it is when you aren't you any more because some fucker stole your identity. I talked to a guy who went through it in his 20s and he told me it made him genuinely suicidal at stages when the banks would get ahead of stuff only to have another CC application land on his credit file.
Your anger over the age verification is the point.
The government want people pissed off about verification services and then they’ll push mygov as a centralised “trustworthy” alternative.
Everything online will be locked behind your government issued digital ID.
Bureaucrats have been pushing towards this for over a decade and they’re inching ever closer.
Oh I can see the lay of the land quite clearly. Have done since a long time ago. I opted out of the Digital Health records for exactly that reason. On day one. The government would fall into that Swiss cheese security model I mentioned before. We as a nation need to be asking the government who is going to pay for all the fallout from these policies, because as I said when I discussed this with the eSafety commissioners office, I would not like to be on record as the politician pushing this if we had to spend tax payer money on rehabilitating society if we have a data leak that causes a million people to need compensatory damages paid to make them whole. Several million people and we are talking GDP levels of financial impact to pay for some politicians brain fart. They are lining up the dominos for a single data breach to cost our economy every cent. All so ASD, AFP and ASIO can spy on us more efficiently, but I'm sure that all the foreign governments we are continually leaking data to appreciate our sacrifice.