Tech expert Tim Levy calls for changes to competition laws to hand social media power back to parents

Cybersafety laws give big businesses more power to control what their adult employees do online than parents have for their children — and an Australian global expert says the Government appears to have no interest in fixing this. Tim Levy, managing director of WA-based safety tech company Qoria, says the political push for age verification will ultimately fail to stop children and teenagers accessing porn and instead put the many adults without children offside. But he says his industry’s calls to change competition laws to allow them to offer parents solutions have gone unheard. At the moment, businesses and schools buying large numbers of laptops, Chromebooks or iPads get greater access to the security controls on those devices than an individual consumer. They get companies like Qoria, OurPact and Bark to install what are effectively parental control apps to ensure the users don’t access anything they are not supposed to. That includes blocking games, offering “kid-friendly” YouTube, blocking messages, filtering swear words or gore content in real-time, and managing the use of VPNs or hotspots to bypass school networks and filters. But if a parent buys their child a device and then downloads an app from one of these companies to do the same thing, most of those blocking capabilities are restricted. “The list of things that businesses can do to spy on, in a sense, and manage the activity of their employee, their adult employee, is chalk and cheese to what Google, Apple, Microsoft allow parents to do,” Mr Levy said. “And most importantly, they allow kids to remove parental controls, which is appalling. “Parents say, ‘Oh, my kids are too smart, they get around it,’ — it’s not because the technology doesn’t work. “It’s because Google, Apple, Microsoft are not allowing parents to use it.” Qoria put in a submission outlining its stance to the parliamentary committee examining social media and Mr Levy has had background conversations with its members but his request to front a public hearing has not been taken up. He wants competition laws changed so the big tech companies have to offer the same level of security controls to everyone. His message is being heard elsewhere; Mr Levy recently travelled to Spain to advise its government and the EU Commission on new cybersafety laws, while Qoria works with school boards in 40 US States with its software covering 24 million children. Parent groups who appeared before the committee on Monday pleaded with the Government to raise the planned age verification for social media platforms to 18 years. A trial of age verification technology is backed by both the Government and Opposition. Australian Parents Council vice-president Karen Robertson said “swift and meaningful” reform was needed to give children a “life beyond screens”. Siobhan Allen from Catholic School Parents WA said lifting the verification threshold higher than the 14-16 years governments were considering would give parents and children more time to prepare for and navigate the online world. “Parents are really, really seeking help with this,” she said. “If there was legislation in place, it just becomes easier. Because as a parent, you know, you can say to your child, ‘Well, I’m not going to let you do anything to break the law’.” But Mr Levy said age verification would be a huge cost and hugely disruptive without solving the problem of stopping children from accessing inappropriate content. Most younger children who stumble on porn find it through an innocent internet search or clicking a link someone sends them, rather than actively seeking it out through a site where age verification might apply. Teenagers are more likely to know how to get around age verification with VPNs — something Mr Levy pointed out is now built in to all iPhones — or use their parent’s device to sidestep the controls. The government’s proposal for devices to have an authorised token once adults have identified their age “will frustrate the hell out of most parents”, has to be redone every time someone gets a new phone, and puts a huge burden on adults without children that would lead to “massive pushback” and the loss of community goodwill.