The most common use case that people think of for age verification is at the point of sale for materials like alcohol and cigarettes, or lottery tickets, where a cashier physically checks a customer’s ID for their date of birth, records that info, and completes the transaction.
However, age verification is now required for a much wider variety of transactions, especially in the online world. This includes the use of digital products like social networks, gaming platforms, marketplaces, messaging tools, and AI platforms. Many of these products have users who are legally considered minors. These ‘underage’ users are old enough to access some, or all, of the services provided by the business, but are under the age at which a physical ID is issued in most countries. Because of this, it is common for these services to insert self-reported age verification. However, self-reporting makes it easy for users to misrepresent their birth date and utilize age-gated services.
Governments are now asking these platforms to control access with greater assurance than can be obtained with a self-reported birth date. This has made age verification part of the larger conversation around digital identity, which can provide the information platforms need to know whether a person meets an age requirement without collecting unnecessary personal details.
New policies in the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom have pushed this question out of the theoretical realm and into mainstream product management and compliance work.
Why governments are taking action
As mentioned, many online age gates that fall outside of restricted goods or adult content rely on self-attestation. In these cases, all the user has to do is enter a birth date or check a box confirming they are old enough to proceed. A child can bypass this type of age gate in seconds.
Social media and gaming sites, as well as AI platforms, often limit the features and experiences offered to younger users. This might include the type of advertising displayed, the availability of messaging features between users, and features in the sites’ algorithms that are designed to increase engagement. Many lawmakers are looking for better ways to limit access, eliminate predatory behavior, addictive design features, and excess advertising. However, policy goals need to ensure stronger protection for minors while also limiting the amount of identity data users must disclose to access sites.
It can be difficult to strike the right balance when seeking to obtain this information with a high level of confidence but without negatively impacting the customer experience with overly intrusive requests. The age check must provide enough confidence that the user is the required age, and that they are the actual person whose information they are presenting, while still protecting privacy, resisting fraud, and avoiding unnecessary onboarding friction.
Three major regulatory developments
United States
In the US, there is active debate about online age verification at the state and federal level, with some showing the potential to become law. Most recently, in June 2026, the US House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act by a vote of 267-117. If made into law, this bill would require platforms to protect younger users by providing controls for addictive features and implementing policies intended to prevent harm such as sexual exploitation. It must still be reconciled with related Senate legislation.
There are also a growing number of state laws and proposals focusing on age-related protections. While early measures have focused on access to pornographic content, lawmakers are increasingly considering age checks for social media, app stores and other services broadly.
For now, without strong federal mandates in place, platforms operating in the US should expect variation between states. One state may require proof that a user is over 18, while another may require parental consent or varying age-appropriate account settings. Due to this variation, a hard-coded age gate is a poor compliance tool. A more adaptable system can give businesses the ability to apply different standards based on the user’s location and their local governing laws.
European Union
The EU is developing infrastructure that connects age checks to its broader digital identity program. Under the EU’s revised eIDAS framework, the digital identity wallets being created by member states will hold credentials that include age information and enable wallet holders to confirm their age without sharing their full identity record. Member states have tested tools that help users prove they are old enough to access online content, while still preserving their anonymity. The rollout for these wallets is expected to begin in late 2026.
For companies that operate across the EU, this changes the approach needed for online age verification. Businesses and service providers may need to accept these privacy-preserving, wallet-based credentials alongside traditional document checks of passports and drivers’ licenses.
Because large platforms tend to standardize their systems across markets for efficiency, this EU model may influence how age verification is done outside of the EU as well.
United Kingdom
The Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom has already put detailed age assurance requirements in place.
Ofcom (the Office of Communications, which is the UK’s independent regulatory authority for the communications industries) requires that services with content that includes pornography, or other content considered potentially harmful to children, use highly effective age assurance techniques. Depending on the service, they might use identity documents, facial age estimation, payment information, a digital identity service, or another method that satisfies the regulator’s standards.
The UK is also building a wider trust framework for use by Digital Verification Services. The framework gives certified providers a role in identity checks which can be used for banking, employment, renting, or proof of age. The government has also conducted a retail trial using digital proof of age for alcohol purchases and has laid out regulations for the use of a digital verification service provider to enable alcohol purchases at many types of establishments in England and Wales.
Age verification versus age assurance
Age assurance is a broad category covering any method used to determine, or estimate, a person’s age or age group.
Age verification is a type of age assurance that uses trusted identity evidence to confirm a person’s actual age or date of birth. In a typical age verification process, a government-issued document like a passport or drivers’ license might be presented and validated, with the user’s face compared with the document portrait, including confirmation that the live person is present. These processes are robust and often combine multiple techniques for verification.
Age estimation is a type of age assurance that reaches a probabilistic conclusion about the user’s age, often using facial analysis. These techniques don’t establish the user’s exact age but can be used to determine if a user appears to be above or below the threshold age for access. It is much less precise and is potentially vulnerable to spoofing. There are examples of age estimation with facial analysis being easily defeated, for example, as in recent news stories where children used physical disguises like fake mustaches to bypass UK age verification requirements.
The distinction between these methods is important when considering vendor selection and compliance design. Low-risk experiences (for example, an online gaming platform without micropayments or private messaging) might support the use of an estimation method with a buffer around the legal threshold, and in contrast, regulated products may require document-based verification and auditable results.
The challenge: Privacy versus compliance
Age verification is typically focused on answering a single question: Is this user’s age over the required limit for specific content, goods, or services?
Passports and drivers’ licenses contain far more information than this. When a business scans one of these identity documents they now have the user’s address, document ID number, exact birth date, and more. Collecting excess data increases the impact of a data breach, and gives users a reason to abandon the process. For example, tens of thousands of users who completed an age verification process for chat app Discord had their government ID photos exposed in a hack in late 2025. News coverage of breaches like this makes some potential customers more likely to abandon a nonessential service rather than risk their information being exposed.
Data minimization should be the goal of any verification system design, allowing the user to provide enough evidence to confirm the required age attribute while withholding unrelated information. Selective attribute disclosure and privacy-preserving credentials are designed around this concept.
To properly balance privacy and compliance, the chosen verification method should also match the level of risk. For a user buying an age-restricted financial product, a high-assurance check is generally more appropriate than for someone changing their content preferences. Requiring the same document workflow for both cases creates unnecessary friction and collects more information than is necessary for a lower-risk decision.
What businesses need to prepare for
As a first step, businesses should identify any point within their user flows where age affects access, content, account settings, or consent. Product and compliance teams can then work together to assign the appropriate assurance level to each touchpoint.
Identity infrastructure should be built in a way that supports those different needs, and is flexible enough to make changes every time a law changes, without requiring the company to rebuild its processes. When assessing a vendor that provides identity infrastructure services, capabilities like configurable workflows, support for digital credentials as well as traditional documents, and clear data-retention controls support this flexibility.
Solutions should also address fraud. Capabilities like biometric matching, liveness detection, and digital manipulation checks make it possible to detect stolen documents, synthetic identities, deepfakes, and injection attacks that can bypass age checks as well as present other fraud concerns.
Why trusted identity matters more than ever
Reliable age decisioning depends on the same evidence that’s used in broader identity verification processes. Systems need to be able to establish that a document or credential is genuine, that it truly belongs to the person presenting it, and that the interaction is taking place with a live person.
Mitek’s age verification technology combines document validation, biometric matching, liveness detection, and advanced fraud signals. Through MiVIP, we can confirm a user’s date of birth, ensure that person is real and present during the verification process, and perform a spate of checks for any form of digital manipulation. By leveraging this approach, businesses can treat age as one part of the identity journey; supporting onboarding, authentication, compliance checks, and subsequent access decisions.
Looking ahead
Social media platforms, marketplaces, gaming companies, prediction markets, and financial institutions should expect further expansion of age verification laws that require them to know whether a user is of appropriate age.
The use of digital identity wallets will also continue to expand, giving users more ways to prove age and other personal information without presenting their full identity documents to every business. As digital credentials become more common, users may come to expect frictionless, privacy-preserving experiences rather than repeated document uploads.
In addition, AI-generated documents and deepfakes will continue to be an issue going forward, especially as the quality of these videos and documents, as well as the ease of creating them, continues to improve. This AI-generated content increases fraud risk across the identity lifecycle, making trusted identity verification even more critical.
These trends extend beyond age verification alone. In Europe, eIDAS 2.0 and the introduction of Digital Identity Wallets represent a broader transformation in how individuals will prove who they are online. As governments and regulated industries prepare for this shift, organizations have an opportunity to modernize identity verification, strengthen compliance, and deliver more privacy-centric customer experiences.
Businesses that build capabilities now which provide a credible age decision, with evidence that the identity data, document, and person presented all belong together, will have a strong base for future age verification laws as well as other identity requirements.
Age Verification Is Only the Beginning
As age verification requirements evolve, organizations need identity solutions that can support onboarding, authentication, fraud prevention, and future regulatory changes. Discover how Mitek helps businesses build trusted digital identity experiences that are ready for what's next.
Adam Bacia — VP of Product Marketing at Mitek
Adam Bacia is Vice President of Product Marketing at Mitek. An award-winning product marketing leader with more than two decades of experience in the IT industry, Adam has managed product development and go-to-market strategies for both client and enterprise portfolios at businesses like Dell, SanDisk, and SailPoint. Over the past 8 years, Adam has focused his attention on the identity, access management, and verification space and currently leads product marketing for Mitek Systems.
