Age assurance plays an important role in keeping children, and their personal information, safe online. It describes tools or approaches that help estimate or assess a child’s age and therefore allows services to be tailored to their needs or access to be restricted, where required.

Our Children’s code is a statutory code of practice. It sets out how internet society services (ISS) likely to be accessed by children should protect children’s information rights online. We have withdrawn our opinion published in October 2021 and have replaced it with this updated version. This opinion explains how age assurance can form part of an appropriate and proportionate approach to reducing or eliminating the personal information risks children face online and facilitate conformance with the Children’s code.

This opinion is aimed at ISS and age assurance providers to explain how they can use the technology in compliance with data protection law in a risk-based and proportionate way.