LONDON — Ofcom, Britain's online safety regulator, set out on Thursday the age-verification methods it recommends for identifying which of the UK's millions of social media users are over 16, ahead of a ban on under-16s that is due to come into force in March 2027, the BBC reported.
Source: BBC News
Ofcom identified four methods it said would be 'highly effective' at gauging people's ages: photo ID matching, where information on a photo ID document such as a passport is checked against a live image taken during the check; banking-based checks, using the age information a financial institution already holds; digital ID services; and facial age estimation technology, which the regulator said has recently improved.
The ban will apply to ten of the biggest platforms, including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Ofcom said the methods must preserve privacy and protect people's data, but that putting a working system in place is the platforms' own responsibility. The recommendations are subject to government approval.
Source: MLex
Ofcom chief executive Dame Melanie Dawes told the BBC the regulator had learned from introducing age checks across the pornography industry, saying: 'What we've said all along is here are things that can work, they must preserve privacy, they must protect people's data, but it's on you to put in place what you think works for you.' She said the ban 'can work if social media firms do highly effective age checks properly'.
The regulator conceded the scale of the task. It said it had no firm number for how many adults would need to prove they are not under-age, but that it would be a 'large number of accounts' for social media companies to deal with, and it warned that the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated — some children will find ways around the checks, as many did under Australia's similar ban, which the UK says it intends to apply more toughly.
Ofcom said platforms may also need safeguards beyond the first check, such as technology that estimates a user's age from their online behaviour to catch accounts that slipped through, and easier ways to report suspected underage accounts. It will consult on further guidance once the regulations are laid. Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, set up in memory of 14-year-old Molly Russell, said he had little confidence the ban could be delivered successfully if it is enforced by the same regulator with the same powers.
Age-checking under-18s is harder than checking adults, Ofcom noted, because 16- and 17-year-olds often have no credit card or full driving licence and may not have a passport, and can look significantly older or younger than they are. Tech firms including Meta have proposed checking age at device level through app stores, shifting the task to Apple and Google; Ofcom said that would not exempt the social media companies from doing their own checks.