April 24, 2025
As online platforms face increasing legal requirements and restrictions around age assurance, clarity on the difference between age verification (AV) and age estimation (AE) has become critical. While both approaches fall under the category of age assurance (AA), and each has its role to play, they differ in how they assure user age.
With regulations tightening regarding age-restricted content or purchasing, platforms must choose between methods that estimate versus confirm a user’s age. The choice isn’t just about convenience but legal liability, security, and trust.
This distinction has never been more important. In April 2025, Ofcom issued new guidance under the UK’s Online Safety Act requiring platforms to implement “highly effective” age assurance measures by the July 2025 deadline to protect children from harmful content. This looming deadline means platforms relying on self-declaration or weak estimation risk falling out of compliance. Methods like self-declaration or age estimation are no longer sufficient, and certainty in age assurance isn’t optional — it’s urgent. Verifiable age checks are a regulatory requirement.
The Problem: Risks of Getting Age Assurance Wrong
Governments worldwide are enacting stricter regulations to prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content, making purchases, or joining social platforms (think of Australia banning under-16s social media). Failure to comply with these regulations can result in hefty fines and reputational damage. More importantly, failure to accurately determine a user’s age could expose a minor to damaging content, place them at risk from malicious contact, or result in them obtaining potentially harmful items like alcohol or knives.
The question is: which approach provides the highest level of certainty, and therefore child protection?
- Age verification, supported by robust identity verification and science-based facial liveness, offers a higher level of certainty for legal compliance. It involves matching government-issued ID documents with biometric data, ensuring that the user is truly who they claim to be and of the correct age. Recent research and real-world implementations demonstrate why this approach provides the strongest legal assurance for compliance, which is one reason the UK’s Home Office has promised new requirements for age verification when purchasing knives.
- Age estimation, by contrast, approximates age based on AI-driven facial analysis or behavioral tracking, which can introduce a margin of error or require a difficult-to-manage second check.
Why Age Estimation Falls Short
Age estimation tools claim to estimate a user’s age using AI-driven facial analysis or online behavior patterns. However, these methods suffer from inherent weaknesses:
- Legal Uncertainty & Liability Risks
When AI-driven estimation misjudges a minor’s age and there is a significant gap between the estimated age and the true age, who is responsible should a malicious act occur? The platform? The user? The technology provider? Regulators are unlikely to accept probabilistic methods as legally binding proof of compliance, making estimation a risky choice for companies facing strict age verification laws. This ambiguity makes age estimation tools unsuitable for legally mandated age verification and has been criticized by experts. If a minor successfully circumvents an age estimation system, it is unclear who is legally responsible, creating a major liability gap for regulated entities. NIST has also picked up several challenges with the accuracy, inconvenience, and bias in age estimation solutions. - Probabilistic, Not Certain – AI-driven facial estimation does not provide definitive proof of age; it only generates a probability score. This means children can sometimes pass as adults and vice versa, leading to false positives and negatives.
- High Error Margins – Even the best AI-based estimation tools have significant error rates. According to NIST testing, these tools often require setting the “challenge age” between 29 and 33 years to maintain a low false positive rate (NIST Report).
- Easily Circumvented – Users can manipulate facial analysis systems using deepfake technology or simple image modifications, making them unreliable for high-stakes enforcement (iProov Threat Intelligence Report 2024). While age estimation is often combined with a liveness check, it’s historically a low-assurance biometric using API-based single-frame liveness, which is unable to provide the level of high assurance needed in these use cases..
Ofcom’s recent announcement reinforces this — estimation alone, especially when unverified, doesn’t meet the compliance bar now being set for protecting minors online.
Learn more about the different types of liveness and how to identify the most secure technology to support your age assurance solution:
Why Age Verification is the Gold Standard
Age verification systems match government-issued ID documents with biometric data, providing certainty rather than probability. Here’s why it stands above age estimation:
- Definitive Proof of Age – Unlike estimation, age verification confirms identity using trusted, government-backed sources. By combining document verification with facial biometric matching, platforms gain certainty that the user is who they claim to be and of the correct age.
- Secure and Fraud-Resistant – Facial biometric verification, particularly with science-backed liveness detection, ensures that an ID check isn’t being spoofed with a photo, deepfake, or injected attack. Passive liveness detection offers additional protection by confirming the user’s real presence without adding friction to the process.
- Legally Robust – In a statutory framework, platforms need certainty in age checks to meet legal obligations. Estimations will not hold up in court, but ID-backed verification will.
- Privacy-Preserving Methods Exist – Decentralized identity systems based on national digital identity programs allow users to prove their age without revealing unnecessary personal details (World Economic Forum Digital Trust Report).
- International Standards Compliance – Regulated platforms can use high assurance solutions that comply with identity proofing standards such as ETSI TS 119 461 (ETSI Identity Proofing Standards).
This is precisely the kind of assurance Ofcom and other regulators are calling for: verifiable, auditable, and biometric-based confirmation of age, not inference.
The Regulatory Perspective
Regulators must consider the liability gap that comes with endorsing age estimation. Who is accountable if a minor gains access to harmful content or purchases a dangerous product, such as a knife, due to the gap between the true age and the AI estimate? With age verification, accountability is clear — platforms can demonstrate compliance by relying on verifiable credentials, which enable users to prove their age without sharing sensitive documents. Regulations should mandate solutions that meet high assurance standards, ensuring accuracy and security.
Additionally, age verification is aligned with broader digital identity initiatives that enhance user trust in online services. A move toward digital identity-backed verification can foster safer interactions while also providing long-term economic benefits (World Economic Forum Digital Trust Report) – McKinsey research shows that countries implementing inclusive digital ID systems could unlock economic value equivalent to 3-13% of GDP by 2030. Additionally, digital identity schemes can make it easier for individuals to access identification, eliminating existing barriers, so the two arguments naturally go hand in hand.
Ultimately, while age estimation might seem like an easier solution, it creates significant risks:
- Inability to definitively prevent minor access to harmful content and protect them from harmful items (weapons and alcohol for example), or harmful digital communities (social media groups) that may look to exploit minors
- Unclear liability when age estimation fails
- Vulnerability to sophisticated spoofing attacks
The Future of Age Assurance: Certainty Over Probability
Age estimation introduces uncertainty, making it inadequate for legally binding age checks or providing a safe digital environment for minors.. Age verification, using ID documents, biometric matching, and liveness detection, provides a legally and technically sound approach.
Moving forward, regulators and platforms should set clear performance benchmarks for age verification solutions, ensuring alignment with international identity security standards. The choice comes down to legal accountability – who bears liability when age checks fail? For legally binding requirements, only age verification meets the necessary threshold of trust and security.
As regulation tightens, especially with Ofcom’s July 2025 deadline, the case for adopting strong, verifiable age verification has never been clearer.
The technology for secure, privacy-preserving age verification exists today. Rather than settling for probabilistic age estimation, platforms should embrace solutions that provide certainty. Legal compliance demands a reliable standard of age verification.
