Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.

And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.

It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it.

> no logging

If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.

I'm not sure what you mean by the logging part. Yes they can either log or not log it. The system can be designed for either. If your default position is "government will always lie given the chance" that's fine I guess. But then you need to assume they're monitoring your ISP anyway.

Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid".

But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion.

mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report.

Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article.

Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you.

I don't want this. I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.

There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?

[0] https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id

[1] https://my.gov.au/content/dam/mygov/documents/audit/response...

[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/media-centre/mygovid-being-renamed-my...

Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).

"I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability"

I mean, technically they could do it and provide at least a modicum of privacy protection. But I will bet they won't because whoever is implementing it will want to be able to point to specifics - specific people, specific times, specific places - so they can cover their arse come the next moral panic moment.

There's zero difference. Either way, the government will have you monitoring your every single little comment online and having it forever tied to your person. And that'll have a chilling effect on individual liberties.

Not just register, but ask permission for and give the government a veto on.

North Korea wishes they came up with an idea this good.

Not to mention that it's likely they wouldn't be able to spy on absolutely everything you do, just parts of it. The tokens would be an obvious point of interest.

On top of that, it's probably a lot easier for the government to justify this kind of spying. They could probably twist information about token use as being some kind of "metadata", therefore "okay to spy on".

Awful idea.

This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.

"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."

That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.

You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.

A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.

They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.

> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part

That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.

> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.

What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.

> An even better idea is to not do any of this

Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.

The trivial workaround is for people to create ad supported websites to hand out those tokens.

If there’s no logging then they can’t determine who’s abusing it or if they’ve even generated a different token recently, so people can generate and hand out all the tokens they want.

So then the goalposts move again, and now there’s some logging in this hypothetical solution to prevent abuse, but of course this means we’ve arrived at the situation where accessing any website first requires everyone to do a nice little logged handshake with the government to determine if they have permission. What could go wrong?

The real workaround is for people (including kids) to buy themselves a VPN subscription for a couple bucks per month and leave all of this behind while the old people are letting jumping through hoops.