France leads age assurance charge in Europe with new Arcom rules: Yoti

Europe is preparing to host the Age Assurance Standards Summit, where industry leaders will gather to discuss age assurance legislation across the continent. A recent blog from Yoti breaks down France’s new age verification law, which came into effect on January 11, 2025, making France “one of the first major economies to actively enforce age assurance measures for viewers of adult content.”  

“The French regulator Arcom has introduced strict new rules to ensure that only adults can access platforms with pornographic content,” it says. Temporary methods like bank card verification will no longer suffice: the law requires that pornographic websites “only use age checks that are effective, privacy-preserving and data minimizing” and “offer users at least one ‘double blind approach’” – which, Yoti explains, “means the platform only receives confirmation that the user is of legal age, and the age verification provider does not know which platform the user is visiting.” 

The law also makes it mandatory to use a third-party age assurance provider “that is legally and technically independent of any online platform hosting or providing porn content.”  

Financial penalties for noncompliance can be up to 4 percent of a website’s global annual revenue – which, for sites like Pornhub, could be in the billions. The regulator has also gained the power to require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to a non-compliant website nationwide.

Yoti believes that for age assurance, “users should have at minimum two options to choose from, allowing them to select the verification method they feel the most comfortable with.” The post differentiates between two options for age assurance: tokenized age verification, and facial age estimation, both of which are “designed to be quick and easy to use. Facial age estimation takes around one second and age tokens help users to seamlessly access different websites, without proving their age from scratch every time.”

Article Topics

age estimation  |  age verification  |  Arcom  |  biometrics  |  children  |  face biometrics  |  France  |  legislation  |  regulation