Publications
New Mexico Court Judgement: Positive or negative for Age Assurance?
On 6 August 2026, Judge Biedscheid of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe issued his findings of fact, conclusions of law and judgement in State of New Mexico v Meta Platforms, Inc. The case had been brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez,...
Why “Device-Only” age checks are a False Choice for lawmakers
A prominent adult platform network recently published an open letter to US lawmakers arguing that site-level age verification laws have failed. In its place, the letter proposes that lawmakers mandate Apple, Google and Microsoft to build device-level age checks into...
BMJ publishes research confirming age assurance is not being deployed in Australia
A study published in the BMJ on 24 June 2026 looked at what actually happened to Australian teenagers in the three months after the Social Media Minimum Age Act came into force in December 2025. The headline conclusion has been widely reported as proof that age...
AVPA Response to Prime Minister’s Announcement on Social Media
PRESS RELEASE AVPA Response to Prime Minister's Announcement on Social Media The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) confirms that the age assurance requirements needed to support a minimum age of 16 for social media are technically achievable using...
Is the EU Age Verification App Ready for a Social Media Minimum Age?
The EU Age Verification App was initially designed with a specific purpose: to demonstrate to adult-only services - pornography platforms in particular - that there was a technically feasible, GDPR-compliant mechanism to implement an 18+ minimum age. And it has...
Australian Minister Annika Wells assesses the success of the social media policy
On 10th June, the BBC's Dharshini David interviewed Australian communications minister, Annika Wells on Radio 4's Today Programme. Listen in full below: The Minister argued that resistance from major technology companies was entirely predictable. If Australia's...
Rhetorically Conflating Age and Identity Checks Is Putting a Sign Above the Door You Want to Close
Opponents of age verification have long reached for a familiar argument: that checking someone's age before they access online content is really an identity check in disguise. The claim is that platforms will inevitably end up knowing who you are, that anonymity will...
California’s Digital Age Assurance Act: A novel parental control, but it’s not age verification
Proposed amendments to California's Digital Age Assurance Act (DAAA) to remove open source operating systems from its scope are welcome. The original drafting inadvertently captured a range of open source projects that have little practical ability to implement the...
Biometrics, Digital Identity and GDPR: Why the AEPD Decision Matters for Every European
The Spanish Data Protection Authority, the AEPD, has recently issued a decision that, if upheld on appeal and followed by other EU data protection authorities, would have profound consequences for the security of digital identity technology across Europe and for the...
AVPA response to UK government consultation on Social Media
The Age Verification Providers Association has submitted a response to the government's national consultation, 'Growing Up in the Online World', which will inform legislation expected to set new requirements for social media platforms, AI chatbots and other online...
Pornhub’s access for Apple users in the UK does not clearly achieve compliance
The announcement that Pornhub has reopened access to UK iPhone users following Apple’s iOS 26.4 update has been greeted in some quarters as a breakthrough moment for device-based age assurance. It is not. What has occurred is the emergence of a partial ecosystem-level...