IEEE developing parental consent standard for online age assurance

Talking about age assurance means talking about parental consent. Many continue to maintain that parents are the best arbiters of what their kids see or don’t see online. Yet, while there is a relatively clear path to standardizing the language and frameworks governing age assurance technology, a concept like parental consent is much more difficult to standardize.

Nonetheless, that’s what a new working group is aiming to do with IEEE P2089.3, “an active project establishing standards for managing and verifying online parental consent.” The hope is to provide a more up-to-date framework than the one offered by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was written 30 years ago.

According to IEEE’s website, the new standard “establishes a framework for the design, specification, evaluation, and deployment of online parental consent systems.” It is to include key terminology and abbreviations, and will define roles and responsibilities of key actors in the parental consent process.

It sets requirements for establishing the levels of confidence (asserted, standard, enhanced and strict) associated with the methods of parental consent, “including confidence in the legal relationship between the minor and the adult giving consent.”

It outlines “a methodology for conformance testing, test assertions, test procedures and statistical analysis of the veracity of the output of parental consent systems, including processes for system certification in accordance with ISO/IEC 17065.

And, it establishes requirements for privacy protection, data security and information systems management that are specific to the parental consent process.

Standard covers ‘who gives consent and to what’

Iain Corby, chair of the working group and executive director of the Age Verification Provider’s Association (AVPA), told Biometric Update, the effort “began with a blank sheet of paper, not constrained by any specific law” – which is to say, unburdened by existing regulations.

Corby says the group is considering the problem in two parts: “who gives consent and to what.” This involves defining different levels of assurance applied to the relationship between the giver of consent and the minor to whom it applies. As well, the  group is trying to standardize what content and functionality is approved “so there is no longer a unique range of requests for every situation.”

Article Topics

age assurance standard  |  AVPA  |  COPPA  |  ISO standards  |  ISO/IEC 17065  |  parental concent  |  research and development