What is age verification?
How age checks under the Online Safety Act work
Age checks under the UK’s Online Safety Act work to keep children safe online by protecting them from seeing inappropriate content, such as pornography. Learn more about how age checks work in the guidance below.
Inside the guide
- What age checks look like with the Online Safety Act
- Why are age checks important?
- How will age verification work?
- Are age checks safe for children?
- Tips to protect your child from adult content
What age checks look like with the Online Safety Act
Under the Online Safety Act (2023), websites and apps that display or publish pornographic or other harmful content must take steps to prevent children from accessing it. These rules are a part of Ofcom’s effort to make the internet safer for children. Ofcom is the UK’s online safety regulator and is working to hold platforms accountable when it comes to protecting users from harmful content online.
Platforms in scope must use highly effective age assurance (or known as age checks) to protect children from seeing pornographic or harmful content.
Currently, the Act requires platforms to use age checks to prevent under-18s from accessing pornographic content and other age-inappropriate content.
Requirements for platforms where users share pornography
Platforms that allow users to publish their own pornographic content, or those that host user-generated content, must ensure that under-18s are prevented from accessing it.
Without implementing highly effective age assurance, platforms will struggle to confirm whether or not a user is over 18.
Why are age checks important?
Verifying users’ age before granting access to certain platforms can help keep users safer online. This is especially true for children and vulnerable people.
Sometimes, children’s curiosity will lead them to seeking out information online that sits on pornographic websites. This can lead to misconceptions and a misunderstanding of sex, relationships and consent. Children might struggle to understand the difference between what they see and reality, especially if they’ve not had conversations about these issues with parents or carers previously.
Age checks can help protect children from seeing content which is inappropriate for their age, confusing or misleading.
How do age checks work?
Ofcom has published a list of age assurance methods it considers to be highly effective at checking whether someone is a child.
Age checks can include:
- Age verification: confirms your exact age or if you’re over a certain age, like 18 (e.g. by checking ID).
- Age estimation: Checks if you fall into a suitable age range, often by analysing physical features or behavioural characteristics (like an email address or a selfie video).
- Open banking where you temporarily share your bank information to help verify your age.
- Photo ID matching where you upload an image of your ID alongside an in-the-moment selfie.
- Facial age estimation where you take a selfie and software estimates whether you look like you’re the age required to access the site or content.
- Email-based age estimation where the software estimates your age based on where else you’ve used your email.
- Mobile-network operator (MNO) age checks where the age associated with your mobile account is used to verify your age.
- Credit card checks where you share credit card information to confirm your age.
- Digital identity services where you might have something like a digital ID you can use.
Ofcom does not consider self-declaration methods, such as entering a birthday or allowing parents to vouch for their child, as highly effective.
Platforms must choose a method that is highly effective based on four criteria:
- technical accuracy
- robustness
- reliability
- fairness.
Ofcom has provided platforms with practical steps to fulfil each criterion.
Any information you share during an age check process is only kept for that purpose. It must then be deleted in accordance with GDPR rules.
What it looks like in practise
We’ve partnered with Verifymy, which is one provider of age check solutions that you may see used across platforms. They divide their ‘highly effective’ age assurance methods into two categories: background age checks and age gates.
Platforms may not use all these methods, but might choose those that they believe will best work with their userbase.
Background age checks are forms of age assurance which can usually fit into a sign up process without a user needing to take additional action. This can include:
- Estimating a person’s age based on their email address to see where else it’s used, which creates a picture of what the person’s age is likely to be.
- Verifying a person’s age based on their mobile phone number to check the age of the account holder and confirm they’re 18 or older.
If any of these methods are unable to determine someone’s age, they will be able to use a different method.
Age gates require users to take manual action, often selecting from a list of ways to verify their age including:
- Entering an email address so the platform can estimate a user’s age.
- Entering a mobile phone number so the platform can verify the account holder’s age.
- Estimating a user’s age based on a short in-the-moment selfie video and the age they appear to be. This will compare their appearance with the birthdate they entered.
- Verifying a user’s age based on the uploaded Government-issued ID alongside a face scan.
- Verifying someone’s age based on a credit card they add.
Quick guide to age checks
Download, share or print this guide to better understand what age checks mean.
If platforms fail to comply with the Act, Ofcom are able to fine companies up to £18m or 10% of their worldwide revenue. They can also take criminal action against senior managers and platforms who do not cooperate. In extreme cases, Ofcom has powers to stop access to a website entirely in the UK.
As of January 2025, platforms that publish pornographic content must have highly effective age assurance checks in place.
By July 25th 2025, any websites or apps that host or allow users to share pornography must have highly effective age checks in place to prevent minors from accessing harmful content.
Are age checks safe for children?
The same way that protections are in place to restrict children from entering sex shops on the high street, age checks create a safety net for children’s protection online.
Although age checks are not a silver bullet, these measures should mean younger children are less likely to stumble across or access pornographic content online.
How will it impact their privacy and data?
Some parents and carers do share concerns about age assurance, particularly around privacy and data. However, platforms must follow UK data protection laws when choosing and using age assurance tools. This means they must consider privacy from the start and apply a ‘data protection by design’ approach.
Plus, age check tools are privacy-preserving – built to incorporate the principles of data minimisation and privacy-by-design. They are designed to protect users’ identities completely. – so they don’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.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has published guidance to help companies use age assurance in a way that protects users’ personal data.
Tips to protect your child from adult content
Although age verification should help prevent children from seeing adult content, it’s important to combine this with other measures to keep children safe online.
- Set parental controls and content restrictions on broadband and mobile networks. Then, explore other parental controls on devices and in apps or platforms your child uses.
- There is no substitute for being engaged in your child’s digital world. Have regular, honest and open conversations with children about what they’re doing online.
- Build their digital resilience by discussing what to do if they do see something that upsets them. This can help them recover better from exposure and encourage them to make smarter and safer choices online.
If your child accidentally comes across pornography or actively seeks it out, they are likely to have questions about what they have seen. Visit our online pornography advice hub for practical tips.