Age assurance standards move into focus ahead of 2026 global summit

Tony Allen has a million things on his mind. At the moment, most of them concern the 2026 Global Age Assurance Standard Summit, which he is organizing for this coming April 14-16 in Manchester. But that means they also concern the global age assurance debate, legislative developments in the UK, Australia and elsewhere, the publication of the ISO-IEC 27566-1 standard for age assurance technologies, Mark Zuckerberg, and the platonic form of the chair.

With age assurance bleeding into ever more corners of the culture, Allen says this year’s summit is focused on “the art of the possible – what you can do to solve the issues, how you can do it well and what you can learn from innovation and creativity across the industry.”

As the first summit since the landmark publication of ISO-IEC 27566-1, the event will feature an intensive master class on the standard focused on practical implementation. Allen’s hope is that the standard, which he helped author, will come to represent the baseline requirements for age assurance systems globally – and that, eventually, we may arrive at the level of trust at which we perform online age assurance as naturally as sitting in a chair.

“The reason we just sit down on chairs and don’t think about it is because they’re all built to international global standards. They’re all the same height. They interoperate with tables. There are thousands of different chairs and different styles and methods out there, but they all fundamentally comply with the same regulations.”

He notes that current chair safety standards came into being in the 1980s. “So that’s 50 years ago. We’re on year one of age assurance being in that space.”

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Article Topics

Age Assurance Standards Summit (2026)  |  age verification  |  biometric age estimation  |  Biometric Update Podcast  |  biometrics  |  ISO 27566-1