ShreRing:- This month, Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age law came into effect, aiming to prevent users under 16 from creating or maintaining accounts on major social media platforms.
The law places responsibility squarely on platforms to take “reasonable steps” to restrict underage access.
But enforcing the rule presents a fundamental challenge: how do platforms reliably verify a user’s age without creating new privacy risks? Age verification at scale has long been a weak point for social media companies. They have historically relied on self-declared birthdates – an approach that is easy to bypass.
Regulators, meanwhile, remain wary of solutions that require users to upload government IDs or sensitive biometric data directly to platforms. A melbourne-based blockchain company, ShareRing, is prooving blockchain IDs as the viable solution. Here’s How
ShareRing’s Blockchain Solution to Help Australia?
To address the gap, Australia ran an Age Assurance Technology Trial this year, testing multiple approaches to age verification under real-world conditions. The trial evaluated dozens of vendors and a wide range of methods. This included document-based checks, biometric age estimation, inference-based models, parental controls, and cryptographic credentials.
Among the participating companies was ShareRing, a blockchain-based digital identity firm. ShareRing claims it achieved a 100% success rate in its trial deployment and demonstrated that age could be verified accurately while passing zero personal data to the relying platform.
While the results reflect controlled trial conditions, they positioned ShareRing as a notable example of how privacy-preserving technology could support enforcement of the law.
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ShareRing’s proposition is rooted in self-sovereign identity (SSI). Instead of repeatedly asking users to upload IDs or photos to each platform, ShareRing verifies a user’s age once through a trusted verifier. It then issues a cryptographic credentials, an “over-16” or “under-16” attestation that users can present to social platforms.
Crucially, platforms only receive confirmation that a user meets the age requirement, not copies of identity documents or facial images. ShareRing says its Darwin-based pilot demonstrated that this selective-disclosure approach can work at scale while significantly reducing data exposure.
What’s Next?
However, with the trial, ShareRing is one of several vendors now positioned as a credible option for platforms seeking privacy-first compliance tools. Its participation in the government trial and strong reported results enhance its standing with regulators and enterprises evaluating age-assurance systems.
However, adoption remains a commercial and regulatory decision for platforms themselves.
But the company’s success in the trial highlights that blockchain’s roles goes beyond crypto markets or speculative use cases. It highlights how blockchain infrastructure is being tested for public-interest regulation, particularly where privacy and compliance intersect.
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