Most regulations require a degree of age assurance proportionate to the risk. A tick box or date of birth field is not age assurance: Ofcom’s guidance says expressly that self-declaration alone does not count, and that a highly effective process must be technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair. Layering weak internal signals on top of self-declaration does not automatically make it highly effective either.
A lawful process should be able to demonstrate, with evidence from real deployment, that it meets those four criteria. This matters because some platforms present self-declaration with ‘heuristics’ (age inference from user-generated content and behaviour) as equivalent to certified age assurance. It is not, and regulators generally do not accept it as such.