ACCS announces participants in Australia’s Age Assurance Technology Trial

In keeping with its philosophy of transparency by default in running Australia’s Age Assurance Technology Trial, the Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) has published its Evaluation Proposal report.

To mark the publication, ACCS held a second Engagement Event in Sydney, at which team members addressed questions about ethics, scope and current participants.

A newsletter from ACCS emphasizes the organization’s commitment to being open and accessible in its findings, noting that, while “there will be variations of the evaluation approach for different methods e.g. parental consent,” the evaluation requirements are common across participating age assurance providers.

“The underlying methodology where participants document what their solution is intended to do in a Practice Statement and the trial confirms that it performs as intended, is common across them all.”

The trial now has a stakeholder advisory board, and ACCS has announced the first 44 organizations with age assurance tech who have submitted formal expressions of interest. A full list of participants is available on the age assurance technology trial’s official website.

As expected, the list includes some of the biggest names in the age verification and age estimation industry, from both private and public sector entities. Among firms ranked in the top ten of NIST’s age estimation evaluation, Yoti and Incode Technologies are present. Austroads, the association of the Australian and New Zealand transport agencies working on mobile driver’s licenses (mDL), is taking its age assurance software for a spin, as is the non-profit euCONSENT project associated with eIDAS.

Other familiar names include Civic, Fujitsu, IDVerse, iProov, Persona, Trust Stamp and VerifyMy.

Social media megalith Meta appears on the list twice – once as itself, and a second time in a joint EOI with Snap Inc., which owns Snapchat.

The ACCS is inviting further expressions of interest, particularly from “relying parties who may already operate some form of age assurance,” to be submitted by February 16, 2025.

For now, participants must prepare so-called Practice Statements, “the basis for the detailed design of the trial process for each method being considered.” The statemenrts are to be based on the new ISO/IEC standard 27566-1. The ACCS’s Tony Allen, who wrote the age assurance standard, will be hosting a free online briefing this week to assist firms in navigating the requirement. The session will be recorded and made available online.

Article Topics

Age Assurance Technology Trial  |  Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS)  |  age estimation  |  age verification  |  Australia  |  biometrics  |  digital identity