New Zealand Under-16 Social Media Ban Policy & Technical Assurance Lab

1. Architecture & Policy Levers

Verification Pathway Architecture

Comparative Legal Framework

Circumvention Risk / VPN Friction: Moderate (28%)

Parental Consent Exemption Clause

Platform Penalty Strictness

2. Identity Flow & Cryptographic Path Device OS Cryptographic Handshake

1. Client Device

NZ Resident (Age 14)

→

2. Token Broker

Device Secure Enclave

→

3. Blind Attestation

isOver16 = FALSE

→

4. Platform Guard

Access Restricted

3. User Cohort Impact & Journey Stress-Testing

Cohort Band	Primary Mechanism	Outcome Status	Evasion Risk	Friction / False Rejection
Under-13 (Child)	Device OS Attestation	Blocked (99.4%)	Low (5.2% via parent device)	0.2% misclassified
13–15 Band (Target NZ Scope)	Tokenized Age Gate	Restricted (88.4%)	Moderate (11.6% VPN / spoof)	1.8% false lockouts
16–17 Teens (Authorized)	Fast-Path Passkey Attest	Granted (96.2%)	Negligible	3.8% credential friction
18+ Adults (General Public)	Cryptographic Zero-Data Token	Granted (98.9%)	N/A	1.1% false negative review

Legislative Assessment Note: Under the representative baseline (Device-Level Tokenized Attestation), platforms incur medium compliance overhead while preserving 91.2% user privacy due to zero raw ID retention on social platform servers.