Under the Online Safety Act, online services must ensure there are effective age checks to prevent children under-18 from encountering harmful content.
Ahead of the publication of Ofcom’s Children’s Safety Codes, our recent tracker survey asks children and parents what they think about age assurance.
Summary
- It is now a requirement under the Online Safety Act to protect children from harmful content online.
- Age assurance are the tools used to estimate or verify a user’s age, with some more effective than others.
- The top concerns children and parents have in relation to age verification are around privacy and data use.
- Age assurance is key to ensuring children have appropriate experiences online.
What is age assurance and why is it used?
Age assurance refers to the methods and tools used to estimate or verify a user’s age. This includes age verification (confirming the age of a user) and age estimation (predicting a user’s age based on their online behaviour or activities such as account they follow and content they interact with).
Robust age assurance is the foundation of the Online Safety Act. The Act outlines that platforms hosting pornography must ensure children (under-18s) can’t access this through the implementation of highly effective age assurance. Other requirements on services include preventing children from accessing other harmful content, such as violent content and suicide ideation. To do this, services will need to use age assurance methods to understand users’ ages and take appropriate measures to restrict access to children.
However, the Act does not currently require platforms to enforce minimum age requirements, and most popular social media platforms do not use age verification at sign-up. We know this is important as a significant number of children are using platforms under the minimum age requirements. For instance, 43% of children aged 9-12 use WhatsApp, 31% use TikTok, and 22% use Snapchat despite the Terms of Service stating the minimum age to use these platforms is 13.
Despite this, our tracker finds that 85% of children and 80% of parents are comfortable with children having to verify their age to sign up to a platform. This is based on a nationally-representative survey of 1,000 children and 2,000 parents.
What are ‘highly effective’ methods of age assurance?
There are lots of different ways one can verify their age online, but not all are highly effective.
While parents and children alike say they are most comfortable with platforms allowing parents and guardians to prove a child’s age on their behalf, this is not considered ‘highly effective’. Ofcom highlights that while parental consent can prove a child’s age, it is also possible that children may input an age that doesn’t require a parental check, circumventing the process.
Similarly, any form of tick-box or self-declaration exercise has been deemed not capable of being highly effective. This will be an important step change as at present, 53% of children tell us they have had to verify their age online with the most common way being through birthdate.
Methods capable of being highly effective include photo-ID matching (uploading a photo-ID document and comparing to a selfie taken in the moment to verify), digital identity services, and facial age estimation (analysing features of someone’s face to estimate their age). We find that preferred methods of age assurance involve using some kind of identification document, whether this is paired with a biometric selfie to confirm identity (22% of children; 27% of parents) or via a digital ID provided by the government (21% of children; 26% of parents).
Over one-fifth of parents and children are comfortable with the use of third-party apps such as VerifyMy or Yoti. These digital services are becoming more popular. For instance, Yubo is the first social media platform to verify the age of all their users at sign-up using facial age estimation technology. As prevalence grows, we might find parents and children become more comfortable with these methods.
What are some concerns about age assurance methods?
The top concerns parents and children have with age assurance methods are about privacy (43% of parents; 31% of children) and how their data will be used (35% of parents; 30% of children).
Overall, children are less likely to have concerns about age verification but are more likely to be worried about access to documentation (18%). This is driven by 9-12 year olds who responded with this, compared to 13-17 year olds (21% cf. 15%). This is likely driven by fear of being locked out of services altogether.
A third of parents (34%) are concerned that children could get around age verification methods.
Despite concerns, age assurance is still key
Age assurance methods are necessary for unlocking the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act. This not only includes preventing children from seeing harmful content online, but also ensuring children can have age-appropriate experiences.
As children grow older, their needs evolve – and so do the risks and opportunities of the online world for them. These nuances must be reflected in the design of platforms and apps. Social media platforms have already begun to do this, such as Instagram’s Teen Accounts, which automatically set accounts for users under 16 to private and limit the visibility of sensitive content in search results and recommendations.
Resources to support families
Age assurance isn’t a silver bullet – we want to help families be better protected online. Explore the following resources to help parents prevent their children from seeing harmful content online.
