Age Verification
Age verification is a check that establishes a user's exact age, or that they are over a threshold such as 18, from an authoritative source like a government ID, a digital identity credential or a bank record. It is one form of age assurance; the other is age estimation, which infers an age or age range from signals such as a face image.
The UK Online Safety Act 2023 draws that line in law: age verification is any measure "designed to verify the exact age" of users, age estimation estimates "the age or age-range", and self-declaration alone counts as neither, while sections 12 and 81 require checks that are "highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child", with Ofcom's guidance published in January 2025 (GOV.UK). In the EU, the Commission's age-verification blueprint (second version, October 2025) lets a user prove they are over 18 "without revealing any personal information, not even their exact age", is built on the EUDI Wallet specifications, and is being piloted by Denmark, France, Greece, Italy and Spain. In the US, the Supreme Court upheld Texas's H.B. 1181 age-verification law for adult sites under intermediate scrutiny in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (June 27, 2025), noting that many states regulate in this area. The identity question is how much the check discloses: uploading an ID to every site creates a data trove, while an over-18 claim from a wallet or mobile driver's license using selective disclosure or a zero-knowledge proof proves only the threshold.
See also: identity verification, selective disclosure, zero-knowledge proof, mobile driver's license, identity verification vendors
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