For many online sites, platforms or businesses that sell or host age-restricted products and content, accurately determining the age of their users online is critical. Age assurance technologies offer a quick and accurate solution for determining user ages, ensuring compliance with age-related regulations and minimising disruption to the user experience. Moreover, proportionality in age assurance is key to achieving this balance.
What is age assurance?
Age assurance encompasses both age verification and age estimation methods. While age estimation typically infers or estimates age based on physical features or behavioural characteristics, age verification determines an individual’s actual age.
Implementing age assurance solutions is critical to ensuring legal compliance with ever-evolving regulations, safeguarding minors from age-inappropriate content, and protecting the privacy of adults wishing to access age-restricted content or services. Proportionality in age assurance helps in adapting the process to different needs.
However, implementing age verification or estimation methods on sites shouldn’t be detrimental to business. When implemented correctly, many key factors contribute to successful age assurance and help businesses maintain pass rates with minimal end user disruption.
What makes successful age assurance?
Several core principles contribute to successful age assurance. These include proportionality, optionality, safeguarding, compliance, end-user privacy, experience, and education. This series will delve into these core principles and explore how they each contribute to successful age assurance. Let’s start with proportionality.
Understanding proportionality in age assurance
Different online platforms have varying levels of risk associated with them, depending on the nature of the services they offer and the potential consequences of underage access. The level of age assurance required by regulators should, therefore, be proportionate to the platform’s associated risk, and different methods can be used to suit different use cases. This is the essence of proportionality in age assurance.
Choosing the right age assurance methods
The spectrum of identity authentication could be considered to vary from comprehensive Know Your Customer (KYC) measures at one end to self-declared age at the other. KYC checks require increased scrutiny and data processing to achieve higher assurance and mitigate greater risks associated with certain scenarios. These levels of checks are suitable for opening a bank account, for example, where users expect more stringent and intrusive checks due to the sensitive nature of financial transactions.
Age verification and age estimation techniques have evolved greatly since the initial introduction of self-declared age checks and sit nicely in the middle of these two extremes. While age verification methods often use an official document to confirm an individual’s exact age, age estimation techniques that leverage an email address or an AI-driven facial analysis offer a low-friction yet highly accurate alternative. Proportionality in age assurance is critical when balancing these options.
Levels of risk
Different platforms have varying levels of risk associated with them, depending on the nature of the services they offer and the potential consequences of underage access. The level of age assurance required should, therefore, be proportionate to the platform’s associated risk, and different methods can be used across different use cases.
For example, the level of assurance that age estimation using an email address would provide would be proportionate for an adult entertainment site or a social media platform to determine a user’s age. From a business perspective, while adult sites do need to have a high level of certainty that a person trying to access their site is not a child, they do not need to prove their identity or require the level of verification a KYC check would offer in order to do this. For the user, this level of age check is beneficial as they’re only required to provide a minimal amount of personal data to access their desired site or content.
Balancing safeguarding and user experience
It’s crucial to balance age assurance measures with a seamless user experience. Overly strict verification processes can deter users, affecting pass rates and revenue. For example, suppose a user trying to access an adult site is presented with ID Scan as an option in isolation. In that case, it may be unreasonable to require them to find an ID document and upload a photo (taken in good lighting) to access their desired site – if, indeed, they even own an ID document in the first place. There is likely to be hesitation from users here from both a privacy and (lack of) education perspective. Using proportionality in age assurance can help find a balance.
There are, however, highly accurate alternatives that offer sites a strong balance between safeguarding and user experience. Sites should implement easy-to-integrate tech with clear instructions to smoothly guide users through the verification process. Methods such as age estimation using email address are widely accessible and use a personal identifier that online web users are instinctively familiar with when accessing accounts or purchasing items online. Consider offering multiple methods to cater to different user preferences and address bias-related concerns – but ensure low-friction methods are included to enhance the overall user experience while ensuring compliance and protecting revenue.
How to integrate age estimation techniques
Age estimation techniques, such as using your email address, offer a less intrusive yet highly effective way to determine a user’s age. Fully compliant and built to preserve privacy and incorporate data minimisation and privacy-by-design principles, this method has minimal friction and works with no discernible bias. It can be used by everyone with an active email address, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other discriminatory trait and is the quickest and easiest way to determine the age of your users online, typically returning a result in as little as 2-3 seconds. Proportionality in age assurance ensures these methods are used effectively.
Integrating techniques such as these can significantly enhance the user experience by providing quick and non-intrusive verification while maintaining a high level of certainty that users are of legal age.
The time to act is now, and the technology is here.
As we’ve discussed, the key is to strike a balance between the level of data required for age verification and the user’s expectations and tolerance for friction. By aligning this process with the platform’s risk level and user expectations, businesses can create a more satisfying and efficient user experience that is low in friction while ensuring compliance with age-related regulations. This is where proportionality in age assurance makes a big difference.
It’s critical that online platforms, regulators, and safety tech providers work together to create a balanced approach that protects platforms’ commercial interests while ensuring compliance and ultimately creates a safer, more inclusive, and user-friendly online environment for all.
