Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

The question of verification is really important. How does one know that the person online is a ten year old, a 12 year old or a 17 year old? We must develop technologies that make age verification practical. Self-verification does not work. We could consider a variety of options. For example, one possibility is that at the purchase time of a device - in other words, when one buys a smartphone in one's local store - the age of the person using that phone is declared. This needs to be done on the basis of a form of ID. An important point I wish to make here is that many parents are buying devices for their children and one could infer that in some sense they are responsible for the content on those devices. I ask the committee to imagine a situation in a school in which boys are sending very personal photographs of themselves of an adult nature - let us put it that way - to their female classmates. The owner of the phone is actually in possession of images that are illegal. If one discovers-----