In the rapidly evolving environment of online interactions, age assurance is becoming a critical component for online platforms looking to maintain their integrity, protect their reputation and safeguard their users. Age assurance encompasses a suite of methods and technologies, including email address age estimation, to verify and estimate users’ ages to ensure they meet the minimum age requirements when accessing specific content or making age-restricted purchases online.
Age assurance is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by advancements in technology, evolving regulatory landscapes, and a growing emphasis on user privacy and experience. Businesses are encouraged more than ever to harness technology to introduce proportional age assurance methods that balance ensuring compliance and protection of their brand and revenue stream, with creating a safer, more inclusive and user-friendly online environment for all.
Introducing age estimation using email address
Our proprietary age assurance solution uses just an email address to quickly and accurately estimate a user’s age. Fully certified and built to incorporate data minimisation and privacy-by-design principles, this method is the quickest and easiest way to determine the age of users online.
Age estimation using an email address can help businesses comply with global legislative requirements, such as the Online Safety Act (UK), Digital Services Act (EU), various pieces of state legislation across the US and numerous other domestic and international laws related to the sale of age-restricted products such as alcohol and tobacco.
What are the benefits?
Accurate:
Age estimation using email address is certified by the Age Check Certification Scheme under PAS 1296:2018 to EAL 3, the highest possible level for age estimation.
The solution is highly accurate, as demonstrated by the ACCS EAL level 3 test audit, which returned 0 (zero) false positive results at +/-18, meaning no children were incorrectly estimated to be adults.Â
Frictionless:
With the user’s registered email address, checks can be performed in the background without the user’s interaction, resulting in an entirely frictionless experience.
Implementing this way allows businesses to undertake age estimation without any impact on the user journey. Removing this friction avoids potential drops in conversion and, in turn, minimises business disruption.
Inclusive and without discernible bias:
This method is fully accessible and widely available. It can be used by anyone with an active email address, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality or any other discriminatory trait, and it works without any discernible bias.
Privacy-preserving:
This method is privacy-preserving and incorporates the principles of data minimisation and privacy-by-design.
The solution is highly effective and designed to protect users’ identities completely. Therefore, it doesn’t generate any information on who a user is; only a yes/no response to determine whether they meet a minimum age threshold, such as 18, or a minimum estimated age.
Speed:
It will typically return a result in as little as 2-3 seconds
The age estimation using email address method can be deployed independently or alongside our range of other highly-accurate age assurance techniques.
Want to know more?
Our recent white paper explores this topic in more detail. From how age assurance has evolved to more on our innovative, robust, and highly accurate method: age estimation using email address, we explore why it’s essential that online platforms provide frictionless and privacy-preserving age assurance methods to ensure children have age-appropriate experiences online that they deserve.
Download the white paper to learn more.
