“Age assurance” is an umbrella term describing approaches for determining which online users are children, to ensure they are offered age-appropriate services tailored to their needs and that they are protected from illegal, adult, or otherwise harmful content or services.

This report maps the current legal and policy landscape for age assurance across OECD Member countries. It analyses laws that establish age-dependent protections or obligations (“age limits”) and therefore trigger a need to assure age. It considers laws covering online safety (including on pornography and social media services), privacy and the online sale of age-restricted goods. 

Together with a companion report benchmarking the age-related policies and practices of 50 online services that children use, this work aims to support government and industry action for promoting the opportunities offered by digital technologies for children while keeping them safe from potential harms and protecting their rights and freedoms.

Key findings

• The legal landscape is complicated.
• Age assurance for age-appropriate service delivery requirements arise in online safety laws that broadly apply to services with a mixed age user-base and exist in 28 OECD Member countries.
• While concerns about social media can be addressed through broader online safety laws, there is a trend of express age assurance requirements being enacted to specifically regulate children’s access to social media.
• There are very few legal protections preventing the purchase of age-restricted goods online.
• Classification rating schemes play a significant role in setting recommended age ratings, but they are not necessarily supported by research or clinical knowledge on child development and processes for granting ratings lack transparency and accountability.
• A lack of specificity on how to comply with age assurance requirements is common across the laws analysed.
• Online safety and privacy regulators are focused on age assurance, setting up working groups, providing targeted advice and in at least one case proposing their own technical solutions.