With the ever-increasing screen time among teenagers and the ease of accessing the internet, the risk of exposure to harmful content, online exploitation, and underage access to adult products is a growing concern for parents, businesses, and regulators alike.
As a business owner or someone who values online safety, you might be wondering how to address these challenges effectively. The complexity of age restrictions and varying laws across different jurisdictions adds another layer of uncertainty.
Fortunately, there’s a solution at hand that not only shields sellers from legal and reputational risks but also ensures that young consumers remain protected from age-inappropriate content and purchases. It’s called “Age Assurance” and it’s the answer to a safer, more secure digital environment for both sellers and buyers.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into its benefits, how it works, and how it can become an invaluable tool for your online presence. So let’s start!
Why is Age assurance becoming more important than ever?
Teenagers today are spending more time online than ever before, driven by factors such as the digitalization of education and the charm of social media and entertainment.
Statistics reveal a significant increase in daily screen time among this demographic, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The appeal of the internet is undeniable, offering plenty of educational resources, social connections, and entertainment options. However, the downside lies in the excessive, often unsupervised, exposure to digital content.
Let’s have a look at two risk situations that we are facing:
- Risks of Extended Digital Exposure:
With extended screen time comes a lot of risks. Young users may inadvertently stumble upon age-inappropriate content, exposing them to violence, explicit material, or harmful user-generated content.
While online education and connectivity have become essential, so too has the need for robust safeguards to protect children. You can not trust the easy bypass of 18+ boxes to avoid children from exposure to harmful content and potential exploitation.
Moreover, there’s the risk of technology addiction, where young individuals become increasingly dependent on digital devices, potentially affecting their mental and physical well-being. It’s clear that while the digital realm offers numerous benefits, it also poses significant challenges when it comes to protecting young users from harm. - Balancing Digital Engagement and Safety:
Striking a balance between the undeniable advantages of digital engagement and ensuring the safety of young users is a pressing concern for parents, educators, and society at large.
Younger internet users, such as children and adolescents, may be more susceptible to cyberbullying due to their limited online experience and coping abilities. If age verification measures are not adequately enforced, younger children may encounter older users who engage in cyberbullying or predatory behavior.
Age assurance isn’t just a choice, it’s an essential solution for fostering a secure and enriching online experience for our youth. To create a safer digital environment where young users can explore, learn, and connect without compromising their well-being.
Let’s now see how online platforms can benefit from implementing age assurance.
The Benefits of Age Assurance for Online Platforms
Nowadays, more and more companies implement digital age assurance solutions to automate the age verification process. These solutions automatically extract and verify the age from official ID documents such as ID cards, passports or driver’s licenses. In practical terms, age assurance acts as a protective shield for all parties involved:
Seller: Ensuring Trust and Compliance
Online sellers find a robust ally in age verification software, safeguarding their interests by ensuring that their products and services are only accessible to individuals of the appropriate age.
This protection becomes particularly crucial due to the complex web of varying jurisdictional laws that dictate the sale of specific items or services. For instance, in the United States, the legal age for purchasing alcohol may differ from state to state, underscoring the critical need for sellers to fortify their defenses through the use of an age verification platform.
Age assurance signifies the dedication to following age-related regulations, which is paramount in today’s legal environment. The risk of facing hefty fines or legal complications due to underage access to restricted content or services is a real and costly concern.
Age Assurance mitigates these risks, ensuring that your platform remains compliant with age-related laws and regulations. This commitment to legality and safety enhances trust among your users and regulators, solidifying your platform’s reputation as a responsible digital entity.
Buyer: Enhancing User Experience
The user experience is at the heart of every successful online platform, and age assurance plays an important role in elevating this experience.
Age assurance streamlines age verification, ensuring that it’s quick, intuitive, and user-friendly. Users can seamlessly verify their age, enhancing their overall satisfaction with your platform.
This improved user experience can have a cascading effect, leading to higher user retention rates and the attraction of new users.
Satisfied users are more likely to engage with your platform regularly and recommend it to others, boosting your platform’s growth potential. In a highly competitive digital landscape, prioritizing user satisfaction through a smoother verification process is a strategic advantage that sets your platform apart.
How can you comply with age assurance regulations?
Understanding and complying with age assurance regulations is a fundamental responsibility for businesses. It’s essential to recognize that these regulations can vary significantly across different regions worldwide.
In the United States, for instance, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) takes center stage, aiming to shield children under the age of 13 online. This regulatory body restricts content unsuitable for younger audiences, establishing distinct content rating standards for children’s online experiences.
In the United Kingdom, interactiveAgeCheck (iAC) shoulders the responsibility for safeguarding minors.
In the European Union, Article 8 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) governs access to age-restricted products and services, ensuring a harmonized approach to age verification.
Businesses aspiring to offer age-restricted products or services must proactively acquaint themselves with these diverse regulations and put in place the necessary safeguards.
To streamline the age assurance, consider exploring our advanced age verification solution, designed to simplify age verification and bolster your platform’s compliance and trustworthiness.
Age assurance with Klippa
Klippa ID verification solutions offer a robust and safe solution for age verification for online platforms. Our solution is designed to seamlessly confirm the ages of your users while prioritizing user privacy and regulatory compliance.
Klippa streamlines age verification across a vast range of regions, making it simple to verify users’ ages from over 150+ countries. Using cutting-edge AI technology, it efficiently captures, organizes, extracts, and anonymizes the necessary data from ID documents, ensuring a swift and reliable verification process.
Next to Age Verification, Klippa can also be your partner for all of your ID verification needs. Here are a few features of our product:
- ID document verification: Verify the authenticity of an individual’s identity documents, such as ID cards, passports or driver’s licenses.
- Detect document fraud: Identify forged or counterfeit documents used for identity verification, enhancing security and trust.
- Liveness detection: Ensure that a live person, rather than a static image or video, is present during identity verification, preventing spoofing.
- Selfie verification: This method requires individuals to take a selfie for identity verification, often compared to a reference photo to confirm their identity.
- Data masking: Protect customer data from unauthorized access or exposure by concealing or encrypting sensitive information.
- NFC checks: NFC (Near Field Communication) checks use wireless technology to verify the authenticity of identity documents or devices, enhancing security and reducing the risk of fraud.
Klippa’s solutions are very easy to integrate into existing software through our APIs or SDKs.
If you are curious about our solutions, or want to see it in action please book a demo with one of our experts below. Start enhancing security, compliance, and user trust across your online platform.