VerifyMy Response to Ofcom Guidance on Age Assurance: a Call for Consistency, Swift Enforcement & Industry Collaboration

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The Online Safety Act (OSA) received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023. It creates a new regulatory framework designed to make regulated internet services safer for users in the UK, particularly for children. To achieve this, Part 5 of the Act imposes specific duties on service providers that display or publish pornographic content on their online services. These include the duty to implement age assurance to ensure that children are not normally able to encounter such content. The age assurance must be implemented and used in a way that is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a user is a child. 

As the online safety regulator, Ofcom has a duty to produce guidance for service providers to assist them in complying with their duties. At the end of 2023 Ofcom opened a consultation on its draft guidance.

Summary of Ofcom proposed guidance: 

• Set out a non-exhaustive list of kinds of age assurance that could be highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a user is a child. 
• Identify types of age assurance that would not be suitable to meet the duties in Part 5 of the OSA.
• Service providers should implement an age assurance process that fulfils each of the criteria of technical accuracy, robustness, reliability, and fairness to ensure that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child.
• Service providers should also consider the principles of accessibility and interoperability to ensure that the age assurance process is easy to use and does not unduly prevent adults from accessing legal content.
• Service providers should ensure access controls are in place on the service to prevent users who have been identified as children through the age assurance process from encountering pornographic content on the service. 
• Services providers should not host or permit content on their service that directs or encourages child users to circumvent the age assurance process or access controls.
• Service providers should familiarise themselves with the data protection legislation, and how to apply it to their age assurance method(s), by consulting guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

As a leading safety technology provider, VerifyMy is committed to supporting the regulator's efforts to implement and enforce the new regime effectively. We believe effective age assurance methods exist. They have been tested at scale and they are privacy preserving. At VerifyMy we believe we need to give users a wide choice - this is why we have developed a number of methods to suit different needs.

In the context of our submission to Ofcom’s consultation on Age Assurance we wanted to take this opportunity to call for: 

Consistency: we agree with Ofcom’s approach to use a non-exhaustive list of examples as this will ensure industry can continue to innovate. Nonetheless we strongly encourage that Ofcom's list of examples of age assurance methods aligns with the Updated ICO’s Opinion on age assurance for the Children’s code (January 2024). This would ensure consistency in how both regulators are approaching age assurance and would contribute to provide better clarity for businesses and ultimately better protection for users. Our email address method has been referenced by the ICO and should also be included in Ofcom’s guidance as it is highly effective, designed to provide robust age assurance that is frictionless, privacy-preserving and without bias.

Swift Enforcement: we urge Ofcom to reconsider the proposed timeline of 2025 and start enforcement actions sooner. Age assurance can be implemented proportionately and conveniently. Privacy-preserving technology is already used at scale; it is highly effective and can be designed to completely protect the identity of the users. 

Industry Collaboration: we believe Ofcom has a unique opportunity to take the lead on children protection by encouraging all players to share best practices, learnings and therefore contribute to build a level playing field. VerifyMy is committed to being a trusted partner to all stakeholders and working towards the safer place we all want.

Lina Ghazal, Head of Regulatory & Public Affairs @VerifyMy