August 2025, World: OECD Report on the Legal and Policy Landscape of Age Assurance Online for Child Safety and Well-Being
The OECD has published an important technical paper on the legal and policy landscape of age assurance online for child safety and well-being. It outlines the efforts and challenges of implementing better and stricter systems, detailing the various legal frameworks and guidelines on age limits, as well as the modes of enforcement across OECD member states.
One of the largest obstacles to better age verification is that age assurance requirements are often only implied in legal frameworks, not specified, muddying the guidelines and enforcement methods. Further, the child’s right to privacy is not always adequately protected, as sensitive data is collected and in danger of being distributed when verifying a person’s age.
Child Identity Protection (CHIP) welcomes the efforts to implement new laws and regulatory bodies to protect children’s online experiences. However, CHIP is concerned for the intersection of age assurance and legal identity: age verification that includes verifying identity and age against official documents (e.g. an official ID document) or verified sources of identification (e.g. a credit card), is inaccessible to people, particularly children, who were not legally registered and may not have a legal identity. CHIP would thus like to emphasise the necessity of universal birth registration to build robust age verification systems and be able to provide equal and appropriate protection to all children.
See: OECD. The legal and policy landscape of age assurance online for child safety and well-being. 27 June 2025.
