Age assurance market reports show industry on the edge of major growth

Energy is high at the 2025 Age Assurance Standards Summit, as stakeholders develop and refine thinking on online age assurance systems. Biometric Update has just published its 2025 Online Biometric Age Assurance Market Report and Buyers Guide – UK Edition. K-ID has issued its own market report. Barnevakten, a Norwegian foundation, has proposed a model that sets two age limits for social media. And the Age Verification Providers’ Association (AVPA) has published a new white paper on age assurance for 13-year-old users.

AVPA says age assurance for those under 18 is ‘perfectly possible’

It’s one thing to ask if someone is an adult or not – but the question of teenhood is different, and services have been wary of tools that claim to be able to perform biometric age assurance on younger people. The regulatory ecosystem has also leaned toward the view that effective age assurance for 13-year-olds can’t be done.

In AVPA’s view, “regulators have accepted the argument, often made by those digital platforms which are themselves expected to comply with such rules, that any form of age assurance below 18 is either impossible or too difficult to implement with sufficient accuracy to be effective, while avoiding the inadvertent exclusion of legally eligible users.”

AVPA says otherwise. “The challenge this paper addresses is checking the age of users below 18, as legal requirements at younger ages have followed restrictions on adult content,” it says. From Australia to the U.S. to Europe, a wave of regulation has targeted social media, restricting use to those 13 years of age or older (or, in the case of Australia, 16 and older).

However, the paper says, “some regulators, such as the UK’s Ofcom, have been hesitant to enforce minimum age restrictions, citing concerns about accuracy and false negatives.” The organization’s CEO, Dame Melanie Dawes, believes that the ways kids vary in appearance over time and a lack of hard identification documents makes the proposition too uncertain.

AVPA says the argument that age assurance below 18 is too difficult rests on two assumptions: first, that “children have less access to traditional age verification methods than adults, leading to exclusion,” and second, that “alternative age estimation solutions may not be sufficiently accurate.”

Nonsense, says the industry group. AVPA cites statistics from the 2021 Census showing “strong evidence that children do have access to traditional age verification methods based on ID documents or authoritative records.” While 13-year-olds might not have driver’s licenses, in the UK, 85 percent of children aged 13-15 own or have previously owned a passport that they could use for proof of age.

They also have bank accounts (51 percent). AVPA Member OneID has developed a zero-knowledge based age verification product using open banking protocols, where users log into their online banking service and give consent to share their age with OneID, which can then pass on the result of an age-range check to a relying party.

Access to any authoritative database for one-way blind checks can be an option; for kids, one resource is schools. AVPA says that “to date, government departments and organisations they control have been very reluctant to provide any access to the data they hold, even under such controlled circumstances. But where the government wishes to implement online age verification at a national scale, it need only make a clear policy decision to provide controlled access to such data, with suitable safeguards in place, and the whole challenge of age verification below 18 becomes no more complex than doing so for adults.”

Proof-of-age cards are yet another option. The Proof of Age Standards Scheme (PASS) offers proof of age documents at low or no cost, which can be used physically in person, or from a digital ID wallet. One option is CitizenCard, issuer of police-approved proof of age and ID cards. Until April 17, the not-for-profit organisation is offering free cards to use for voter ID and age assurance. Cards for 13-15 year olds are always free. Like other PASS cards, CitizenCard offers a free API check to assess validity of 13-15, 16-17 or 18+ cards.

Ultimately, AVPA puts forward “two leading examples of solutions that will enable the vast majority of adults and many children to prove they are thirteen or older.” These are email age estimation and biometric facial age estimation.

The email method analyses how an email address has been used online, on sites and apps, and estimates the age of the user based on their online activity. A 14-year-old is unlikely to have registered with a mortgage broker, purchased a house or ordered a new furnace. AVPA highlights the work Verifymy has done in this space; the company has “published detailed results of testing of this technology,” showing an overall true positive rate of 97.76 percent” for individuals under the age of 18, “meaning that this approach correctly estimated the minimum age of 828/847 of the testing set.” Other firms, like Yoti, are beginning to offer this service as well.

AVPA says biometric facial age estimation is “perhaps the most well-known and widely used method of age estimation.” A number of AVPA’s members offer facial age estimation systems, and over 1 billion facial age estimation checks are now undertaken annually. They are regularly vetted and benchmarked in tests by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), and while concerns around false positive rates remain, the NIST dataset uses some medium-quality images that may not reflect real-life scenarios; as such, says AVPA, “NIST figures can be considered a worse-case scenario.”

Finally, there is the “backstop method” – “professional vouching, where a school administrator, doctor, solicitor, or other registered professional verifies a person’s age.”

Ultimately, AVPA believes regulators have their priorities mixed up. While much is made of false negatives, which incorrectly classify eligible users as underage, the issue of not being able to watch porn as an adult is presumably less pressing than protecting kids online, especially if there are options for challenging false estimations. The group argues that “it is false positives that should be the primary concern of regulators, as this is where the risk of actual harm to children is far greater.”

“The ability to challenge and correct ensures that no child is unjustly excluded from accessing services to which they are legally entitled is still an important mechanism for upholding child rights online. But regulatory hesitancy to enforce age assurance due to potential false negatives overlooks these readily available solutions.”

In conclusion, says AVPA, “age assurance is perfectly possible for children below the age of 18.

In most cases, an estimation technique, with or without a buffer age, is more than fit-for-purpose. Where an exact check is required, then estimation may need to be reserved for those already a few years above any minimum age, but there are plenty of options for age verification available to minors that will confirm a specific birth date.”

K-ID’s State of the Age 2025 Market Report, which focuses on the U.S., underlines how much work is still to be done in clarifying and codifying online safety rules to protect kids. Legislation is moving: “over 37 jurisdictions passed new laws and regulations in 2024 relating to the protection of digital youth online, and the United States alone now has over 60 state laws, bills, or other requirements that affect digital youth.”

The regulatory landscape is only getting more complex, as new industries get drawn in; the report notes that “the number of games implementing an age gate has increased by 25 percent over the course of 2024,” indicating “a strong signal that the industry is reacting to the increased regulatory complexity and legal risk associated with digital youth.”

Yet there are fundamental questions that are still ambiguous. K-ID points out that “there isn’t even a consensus on how to define a ‘child’.” And there is legal pushback from adult content providers, social media giants and digital rights groups. “In recent years,” K-ID says, “several constitutional challenges have been raised against state laws that add extra requirements or restrictions concerning children’s privacy, with the outcomes of these legal battles still awaiting resolution.”

Barnevakten’s publication is focused on a proposed model for balanced age assurance for social media in the EU and Norway. The foundation “believes that two age limits for social media are necessary, based on the DSA and privacy regulations.” It looks to the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which Norway is expected to adopt in the coming years, and which requires social media platforms to provide a more child-friendly experience for users under 18. Still, that means users over 15; per the report, “Norway is actively working to raise its privacy age to 15 and enforce it legally, effectively blocking social media access for those below this age.”

2025 Online Biometric Age Assurance Market Report & Buyers Guide – UK Edition

Article Topics

Age Assurance Standards Summit (2025)  |  age verification  |  AVPA  |  Barnevakten  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  k-ID  |  market report