2025 promises to be a very busy year in the world of age verification. In this post, we, as the global trade body for suppliers of age verification and age estimation solutions, look forward to what to expect over the next 12 months.
Implementing global legislation
Much of 2024 was invested in preparing the detailed implementation of new legislation requiring age assurance and this year will see the results of that effort:
In the UK, Ofcom consulted on new guidance and statutory codes to prevent illegal harms and implement child safety duties. Both will see new legal requirements come into force this year, with the main “AV-Day” now scheduled for July. At this point, platforms must use highly-effective age assurance to protect children from the primary priority harms designated by the Online Safety Act – pornography, self-harm, diet and suicide information.
In the US, much turns on the outcome of the Supreme Court’s hearing on January 15th on the constitutionality of Texas Law HB 1181, requiring age verification for pornographic websites. The Court must consider if filtering, the option it favoured as the least restrictive means of achieving an accepted state policy objective to prevent children seeing pornography, has been effective over the past 20 years, and if not, whether the latest AV technology is easy enough to use that it does not unduly burden adults’ rights to access such content.
While the result is not expected until July, many states will be implementing similar laws unless opponents secure temporary injunctions. Florida’s HB3 and South Carolina’s HB 3424 both came into force on January 1st, and Georgia’s SB 351 will follow in July (Tennessee’s SB1792 was stayed at the 11th hour). That will bring to 19 the total states with legislation in place and the prospect that a majority of states will have done so by the end of 2025. And there is a new Congress with a Republican majority in both Houses, which may follow the lead of their state colleagues and pass federal age verification legislation, particularly if it is approved by the Supreme Court.
We can expect the EU to pay close attention to the four adult sites it designated as Very Large Online Platforms – Pornhub, Stripjoint, xVideos and latterly, XNXX – meaning they are directly regulated by the Commission. Member states remain responsible for enforcing the Digital Services Act against all the other sites with fewer than 45 million monthly users in the EU, but will now be set an example by Brussels of what is expected when it comes to the protection of minors from pornography, as these rules apply to sites of all sizes.
The Canadian House of Commons has finished its committee hearings into Bill S-210, introduced by Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, against government opposition and the Canadian standards body is consulting on a near-final standard that could support its enforcement.
In Australia, a trial of age assurance technologies is underway, due to report by June. This will be a landmark for the industry, providing the first fully comprehensive, independent tests of all forms of age assurance, as well as parental consent and controls, and to the extent it is possible to test concepts, a review of alternative controls elsewhere in the technological stack – such as app store age checks.
Implementing international Standards
After several years of work, we are now seeing the latest international standards become embedded in the implementation of age assurance. Increasingly, relying parties will require conformance with a standard as part of their procurement process. The IEEE 2089.1 standard was a key input for legislation drafted in Utah; and both it and the ISO 27566-1 Framework for Age Assurance were embedded in the Australian government’s tender for the trial mentioned above.
In the Spring, the ETSI Specialist Task Force commissioned by the European Commission will report with a recommendation for a proposed age verification solution (ready for standardization) based on its analysis of stakeholder requirements and existing solutions.
And this year, a working group of industry experts will begin work on IEEE 2089.3, a new standard for parental consent. This will seek to agree a common approach suitable for implementing a wide range of global legislation where a frequent requirement is that parents or guardians must consent to access to certain platforms for children in certain age-ranges, updating the verifiable parental consent standard set by the Federal Trade Commission over ten years ago.
In April, the second annual Global Age Assurance Standards Summit will convene in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It will bring together national delegations of regulators from across multiple disciplines – data, content and age-restricted product sales – with the world’s leading experts on privacy preserving, secure, reliable age assurance measures. This year’s object is to discover and align how the ISO 27566-1 – Age Assurance Systems – Part 1: Framework and other standards can support regulations which work well in a globally interoperable standards framework.
Implementing Interoperability
The age assurance industry has been working throughout 2025 with euCONSENT ASBL, a non-profit organisation in Brussels with an objective it shares with that sector, to make the Internet age aware. Thanks to funding from the Safe Online organisation, it has almost completed building the AgeAware ecosystem which will enable a tokenized, interoperable approach to age assurance, meeting the latest requirements from certain EU regulators for double-blind and device-based options.
Implementing other options
Protecting children online should not be left to one single solution. While applying a control as close to the harm you are trying to prevent is likely to be the most effective option, other measures should not be dismissed. We still need to build resilience through digital media literacy initiatives. Parental controls can be effective to a limited extent, but only if parents know about them, know how to use them and are determined to do so. Schools already make good use of filtering so that has a role to play too. And in the circumstances when content and functionality is accessed through an app on a smartphone, then if app stores are willing (or forced) to offer age verification, that too could play a role in future years.
The ISO steering committee responsible for the mobile Driving License series of standards, 18013, is considering how that could accommodate anonymized selective disclosure. The EU has commissioned a largescale pilot to try using the EUDI Wallet for age verification, but also perhaps conceded that this is not straightforward by simultaneously commissioning an Interim AV App. Neither of these options are not obviously designed to help children prove their age but could have a role to play for some adult use-cases if consumers are comfortable with that.
There are no silver bullets however. We will continue to advocate throughout 2025 for more protection to make the Internet safer for kids, and believe that independent, standards-based, privacy-preserving age assurance is the fundamental foundation for that goal.
So, what are the prospects for the AV industry in 2025
We gained 12 new members last year, and expect to see double that number join in 2025, as age assurance laws finally kick into force. Our members successfully completed over a billion age checks and that will likely double or more this year.
Jurisdictions without age verification requirements will become conspicuous by their absence. Interoperability will be crucial to maintaining public support. We expect more innovation in this field, as estimation methods become more accurate, alone and in combination. Governments may finally offer better access to reliable data on children’s ages often only found in closely-guarded official records, as they understand the concept of one-way blind checks and their legislative objectives for child safety outweigh naturally risk-averse instincts to insulate data.
2025 will see the culmination of a great deal of work – innovative solution development; passing legislation and preparing regulations; agreeing international standards; testing, trials and audits; and advocacy to build support and confidence in age assurance. Will this be the year when we finally implement online the same age restrictions societies have imposed in the real world for over a hundred years? We believe it will, and we will look back on the decade where children were given completely unprotected access to the Internet with horror.
