#AgeAssurance technologies are gaining more visibility that they deserve. After all, age assurance is an indispensable responsibility for any business and organization that needs to implement digital safety by design for children.

On Friday, 07-07-2023, I had the pleasure to represent Privately SA in OECD – OCDE‘s Roundtable on Digital Safety by Design for Children. Policy experts, regulators, academics, and private enterprises have held panels for the various aspects of Digital Safety by Design: policy landscape, the best-practices, immersive technologies, and age assurance solutions.

Privately SA was invited to this event to provide technical expertise in the panel for Age Assurance. We had shared this panel with Russell Bagnall, Liz Thomas, Julie Dawson, and Bertrand Pailhès, under the moderation of Leanda Barrington-Leach

As a panelist, we have contributed to the draft OECD report with the following key points, which resonated strongly with all participants:

1. For today’s age assurance needs and constraints, there already exist audited and certified solutions such as Privately’s AgeAssure. #ageverification

2. Privately’s AgeAssure is a certified, accurate, privacy-preserving, spoof-resistant, #biometrics -based age estimation solution. It implements the Zero Data Principle, as it runs completely on the user device – no facial or voice data ever leaves the user’s device. #privacybydesign

3. Face-based and voice-based age assurance techniques are configurable, effective, feasible, inclusive AND proportional way of age checks for most of the use cases. #inclusivity #proportionality

4. Face recognition models learn age-invariant features to reliably identify individuals. On the other hand, age estimation models (such as our FaceAssure) learn identity-invariant features to reliably determine age. Therefore, age estimation technologies DO NOT identify individuals. #responsibleai

5. Thanks to anonymised & aggregated #analytics from AgeAssure, we can build a future where everybody wins: policy makers can base their work on more evidence, regulators can obtain companies’ transparency reports on demand, and companies can improve their products and services with the clear conscience of not using any personally identifiable data. #privacycompliance #knowyouraudience #data

We also noted with great satisfaction that regulators continue to coordinate their efforts. This makes it easier to comply with privacy regulations across the globe. And, with responsible innovation, platforms and technology providers will deliver online experiences with digital safety for design for children. #responsibleinnovation We thank everyone who took part in the discussions with their expertise and excellent questions. We look forward to fostering our collaborations!

Special thanks to Jeremy West, Andras Molnar and Lisa Robinson for the organization.