The Federal Trade Commission recently held The Age Verification Workshop to examine issues on a wide range of issues related to age verification and estimation technologies. The biggest takeaway from the January 28 workshop is that companies with a website or an app need to consider incorporating these types of age assurance and age verification tools in the future.  While existing laws in the United Kingdom and the European Union mandate these technologies when users access “harmful content," these types of laws are only now being passed in the United States. The most prevalent age verification requirements in the United States are laws requiring age verification to access pornography or social media. More recently, states also have started to pass laws that require app stores to implement age verification and parental consent mechanisms. While some of these laws are being challenged as unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court's recent ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton indicates that these types of age verification requirements pass Constitutional muster—at least as it relates to pornography.

The workshop brought together panelists from throughout the age verification ecosystem—including the FTC, social media platforms, children's ad-tech companies, app stores and consumer advocacy groups. All the stakeholders emphasized the importance of collaboration among the different players within the system to incorporate these age verification and age estimation technologies, which include government identification verification, credit card verification, age tokens and facial age estimation.

The clearest call for the future use of age verification technologies came from FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson. Chair Ferguson stated that he anticipated that the FTC would not only issue a policy statement on age verification based on the workshop, but he also predicted that the FTC would amend its Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule to incorporate these types of technologies. He indicated that these technologies may not only make it easier for companies to comply with COPPA, but that incorporating age verification technologies may act as a type of safe harbor relieving companies of some of the burdens of COPPA compliance.