KGI’s Age Assurance Rules provides practical recommendations for designing age assurance rules that support youth online safety while appropriately accounting for tradeoffs involving privacy, service availability, competition, and openness.
Guide to age assurance
The internet offers children and young people many empowering opportunities for personal growth, learning, and social exchange. However, along with these great benefits can come certain risks, including children facing content or services that may be harmful to them. Age assurance is one solution that can be used to keep children safe from online risks.
Age Assurance Methods Explained
This blog also appears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what age-gating laws actually do, what’s at stake, how to protect yourself, and why EFF
Ensuring a safer online experience for U.S. kids and teens
An overview of our approach to age assurance and our commitment to online safety for young users and families.
The Dangers of Age Verification Provisions
One proposed solution to ensuring safe youth online experiences is age verification provisions, which require platforms to confirm the ages
Age assurance across Europe: how countries are safeguarding minors online
In 2024, regulators and online service providers fully aligned around the Digital Services Act (DSA), a groundbreaking piece of legislation that regulates the provision of online services within the EU, regardless of whether the provider is based in Europe or not. This year, the focus has shifted to implementing these legislative principles in practice. In particular, measures aimed at safeguarding minors have gained significant momentum, with age verification being a key example.
Online age-verification tools spread across U.S. for child safety, but adults are being surveilled
New age-verification laws and tools are designed for child safety on social media and the internet, but adults are in the crosshairs, say privacy experts.
Children’s Rights and Online Age Assurance Systems
Abstract Age assurance is a way to prevent children accessing content, products or services that are potentially harmful to them, ranging from gambling services or alcohol or tobacco or, increasingly, certain products and services online. Now that children’s lives are mediated by digital technologies, policymakers are deliberating over the legal, technical and practical challenges. These have been little examined from the perspective of children’s rights. By combining legal and social research methods, this article examines the legal requirements for age assurance in Europe, assesses compliance by companies and reveals the consequences for family life. In law and practice, we show that age assurance is often ineffective in protecting children from online risk of harm. Further, as currently implemented it risks children’s other rights – to non-discrimination, privacy, to be heard, and their civil rights and freedoms, and remedy. We identify promising directions for the use of age assurance in child online protection, focusing on European policy, regulators and civil society actors.
Online age verification systems fail to protect children | Proton
Do online age verification systems improve child safety? See how age restrictions and age checks fall short, and what that means for privacy and protection.
The Digital Loophole: 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy, ICISSP 2025
Social media platforms are an integral part of daily life for nearly five billion people worldwide. However, the growing presence of underage users on these platforms raises significant concerns regarding children’s exposure to harmful content and its impact on their mental health. This paper examines the effectiveness of age verification measures implemented on leading platforms Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and X. We evaluate the age verification processes required for account creation by simulating the registration steps for minors on these platforms. We also compare these methods to best practices in online age assurance in finance, betting and public transportation sectors. IEEE provides a standard for evaluating the age assurance of a platform or service. Our study benchmarks each platform’s approach against the IEEE standard for robustness. Our research identifies gaps that allow underage users to easily bypass existing age restrictions, with particular practices such as allowing disposable emails and basic browser refreshes further weakening self-declared age checks. The findings highlight the need for more robust age verification measures by social media applications to support their stated age limit policies. This work emphasises the urgent need for stronger and more reliable age verification methods to align the digital age of consent across EU member states and beyond with the minimum age requirements on social media.
Age verification is coming for the internet — and it’s already raising red flags
Legislative efforts to age-gate parts of the internet are gaining traction. Some experts warn of compliance complications and data security breaches.
Online Age Verification: Government Legislation, Supplier Responsibilization, and Public Perceptions
There are widespread concerns about the online harms to children operating online. As such, governments have enacted laws to require online service providers to deploy age verification to prevent such harms. We investigate the following three research questions regarding this topic: (1) To what extent have different governments legislated age verification controls? (2) Do governments embrace a responsibilization strategy when it comes to online age verification? and (3) How does the UK public feel about online age verification legislation? We find that governments are applying a responsibilization strategy, which has led to widespread deployment of privacy-invasive or ineffective age verification. The former violates the privacy of underage users, with the latter undermining the overarching aims of the legislation. We have also found general disengagement and a lack of trust in the government amongst the public with regards to new online age verification laws within the UK. To conclude, despite governments globally looking to put more robust online age verification mechanisms in place, there remains a general lack of privacy preservation and affordable technological solutions. Moreover, the overarching aims of the online safety and age verification legislative changes may not be satisfied due to the general public stakeholder group's disengagement and lack of trust in their government.
Supreme Court Upholds Age Verification: A Game-Changer for Child Online Safety Laws – Public Interest Privacy Center
Exploring Privacy-Preserving Age Verification: A Close Look at Zero-Knowledge Proofs
A path toward protecting young people online that doesn’t sacrifice their privacy or data security, amid persistent concerns about screen time.
Age Verification and Age Gating: Resource Hub
Age verification (or age-gating) laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious
Teen and Parent Perspectives on Approaches to Age Verification
Age verification (AV) is being rolled out by online services to comply with new laws in Europe and across states in the United States. Proposed legislation at the federal level in the U.S., such as the Kids Off Social Media Act and the Kids Online Safety Act, may also result in increased adoption of AV […]
Who’s Harmed by Age Verification Mandates?
Age-verification laws may sound straightforward to some: protect young people online by making everyone prove their age. But in reality, these mandates force users into one of two flawed