A conversation on smarter and safer age assurance for Europe

While some would like a more uniform system, or a universal arbiter of age, we believe that liability and responsibility rest with every service owner — the developer, the publisher, the app creator — because they know what they are offering. You don’t expect the credit card company to check if you are old enough to buy alcohol; the store should do that.

However, Google is helping by adopting standards and open-sourcing technology to make it safer and easier to adopt privacy-preserving age checks.

In our own services, we’ve used machine learning-based age estimation in Europe since 2020:

• Safer by default: We apply baseline protections until we have confidence the user is an adult (e.g. age restricting mature content on YouTube/Google Play).
• Assurance trigger: If a user declares they are 18 or older, we run their account information through our model to confirm their age.
• Extra protections: If we can’t confirm they are an adult, we enable features including SafeSearch and…