Age assurance laws in the EU and US

Legislators and companies are increasingly paying attention to the age of online users. While companies have tended to implement age assurance systems to prevent minors from using their online services, since 2025 they are now using these systems more often to restrict their access to certain content. These decisions have been based on frameworks that establish minimum acceptable methods that companies should implement within their online services. 

State legislators in the U.S. have adopted multiple approaches in their attempts to require that companies verify a user's age before granting them access to certain content. Meanwhile, the European Union has also called for a common approach that provides data protection to consumers within the bloc through age verification.

Age assurance vs. age verification

Although the terms age assurance and age verification are used interchangeably, there are technical differences between them that are relevant to the obligations that laws and programs on age safety create. Age assurance usually refers to any method that online services rely on to determine the age of consumers. It includes practices such as the user inputting their date of birth or scanning a government-issued ID. The term age assurance also includes other categories such as age estimation, which is done through algorithmic analysis; age attestation, whereby the user declares their age; and age verification. More specifically, age verification requires that the user provides verifiable evidence of their age typically through uploading a government-issued ID or via other commercially available methods, such as demonstrating credit card ownership. Age verification usually serves a double purpose of verifying the identity and the age of the user.

Age assurance from the US perspective