Proof of Age, Brought to You by Your Bank

I’ve been dipping into r/AussieFrugal again, partly for the bargain tips, partly because it’s a good barometer of what’s actually annoying people at a household level. This week it wasn’t grocery prices or electricity bills that had people worked up. It was a bloke, forty years old, who has never needed a credit card in his life and now has to get one just so Steam and Apple will believe he’s an adult.

Read that again. Forty years old, married presumably to a mortgage and a Medicare card and every other piece of adult infrastructure you can think of, and the system has decided the only acceptable proof of his age is a piece of plastic that lets him borrow money he doesn’t want to borrow.

This is the flow-on from the eSafety Commissioner’s age verification push. The intent is sound: keep under-16s off certain platforms, keep porn and gambling ads away from kids, all things I’m broadly on board with as someone raising a teenager in a world that hands her a supercomputer in year seven and expects her to develop the wisdom of a fifty year old at the same time. But the execution, at least on the Apple and Steam side, has landed somewhere strange. Debit cards don’t count. Passports and driver’s licences work, but plenty of people, understandably, don’t want to upload a scan of their government ID to a games company. So the fallback is: get a credit card.

Which means the policy is quietly pushing people who deliberately avoid credit, for very good reasons, back into a product they don’t want. The thread was full of people trading tips like it was a heist movie: get the CBA Low Fee card, set it to auto-pay the balance every month, never touch the interest rate, use it for exactly one subscription and forget it exists. One person had spent ten years crawling out of credit card debt and was now being told by an age verification system that this was the only door back in.

I don’t have a tidy villain here. Apple didn’t write the law. The eSafety Commissioner didn’t design Apple’s verification flow. Steam is apparently just refusing to offer any alternative at all, which several people in the thread called out as Steam not really complying with the spirit of the law, just the letter of it, and probably the cheapest letter they could find. Everyone is technically doing what they’re supposed to, and the result is a forty year old, gainfully employed grown adult who has to go shopping for a financial product he explicitly does not want, purely to tick a box that has nothing to do with money.

I got my own taste of this a few months back, trying to update something for my daughter’s school portal that suddenly wanted a Digital ID verification step. Nothing sinister, just an afternoon lost to a system built to solve one problem creating three smaller ones downstream. Multiply that by every household in the country and you start to see why threads like this get fifty comments in a day. It’s not really about credit cards. It’s about how often the friction of a new rule lands on ordinary people doing the right thing, while the platforms the rule was aimed at find the path of least resistance around it.

The frugal answer, in the end, was almost sweetly practical: get the low-fee card, automate the payment, treat it like a chore rather than a tool, and move on with your life. Which is fine advice. But it’s also a small, telling symptom of how digital policy gets made lately, aimed at a real problem, landing hardest on people who were never the problem in the first place. I don’t know how you fix that without a lot more care in the drafting than anyone seems willing to put in right now. I do know that somewhere in Cupertino, a debit card is sitting in someone’s wallet, perfectly capable of buying a house, and still not good enough to prove its owner is old enough to play a video game.