Developing an Age Assurance Tool That Parents Can Trust

A common concern among our Common Sense parents and caregivers is that their kids or teens are seeing content and having experiences online that they're not mature enough for. Most sites lack robust age checks, so kids can easily gain access to adult spaces on social media or sites for gaming, pornography, and other adult activities. Parents are rightfully worried about their kids, but aren't sure what to do.

Platforms and app makers often place the burden entirely on families to attempt to restrict and monitor what kids have access to online. Many families struggle with this problem, especially those with less access to, and less comfort with, technology.

This week, we're launching a new solution to that problem. Bandio is a new tool that helps parents create what's called an "age band"—a way to identify a user as a child or teen and ensure they have appropriate online experiences for their age group. Our goal is to ultimately build an ecosystem of sites that can simplify age assurance for parents, while ensuring their children's privacy, and we're starting today by rolling Bandio out on commonsensemedia.org.

Here's why we think Bandio (and age bands!) is a strong solution to keeping kids safe in a digital world.

Alleviating the burden on parents

Ideally, young people should only be able to access age-appropriate sites, apps, and content. Some sites already provide a higher level of safety and privacy settings for users who declare that they're a kid or teen. These settings vary, but can include benefits like making a child's profile private by default, limiting the ability for strangers to see a child's posts or voice chat with them, preventing violent or explicit ads from being shown, and limiting access to content intended for older teens or adults—all features that have harmed children in the past. Unfortunately, these features are applied voluntarily and are not required, as they should be.

Today, the responsibility to keep kids safe online is left with parents, who face a conflicting choice. They can choose to restrict their growing young person's access to technology and ban apps that they're unfamiliar with entirely. Or they can spend hours every week keeping up with changes to the apps themselves: reviewing settings, trying to grasp what content their kids have encountered and how it has impacted them.

Right now there is no sensible middle ground where children can access platforms and be reliably protected by default from inappropriate content and unsafe interactions. It's infuriating to parents to have to choose between two terrible, difficult, and limiting options.

Advocates and lawmakers around the world are generating momentum by crafting legislation, and in some cases enacting laws, to protect kids online by seeking to define what duty of care technology companies should have when it comes to minors. The U.S. Senate recently passed the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA), a major advancement for kids' online safety legislation. Nearly all of these policy efforts are grounded in the basic principle that platforms should be age-appropriate by design and have the greatest level of privacy by default.

Creating a new industry standard for age assurance

The obvious question raised next is, "How do platforms and sites safely conduct age assurance for new users?"

One path is for parents to clearly communicate their kids' ages to the apps and sites they use. We surveyed 500 parents and caregivers around the world about verifying their kids' ages before they use online tools. Most told us they are comfortable with some form of age assurance of their kids online, especially if it results in a better, more age-appropriate online experience.

Establishing an industry standard tool that can confirm the age range of a user is a strong solution, and one we believe is necessary. For it to be effective, the tool must fulfill three baseline expectations:

• Protect personally identifiable information.

  Age assurance cannot compromise legally protected privacy rights or create a high risk of exposing sensitive information. In our survey, nearly 58% of parents said they're willing to share some personally identifiable information (PII) if it can keep their kids safer online. One solution is to establish a user's age at the beginning and then store only the final proof that the age was properly verified, without holding on to the documents or images used to verify. Temporary use of minimally sufficient data is a workable compromise to protect both children and privacy.

• Prevent "tricking the system."

  Exploration and curiosity are the core of childhood. Young users want to have access to everything the world has to offer, often without yet having a full understanding of the impact that their online experiences will have on them. It's tempting for kids to lie about their age when given an easy opportunity to do so, like when they're asked to merely enter a birth date to "prove" that they're old enough to enter a certain space. An age assurance tool must be difficult for kids to fool.

• Easy for everyone.

  With each kid using 50+ digital services on average, it's absurd for parents and caregivers to have to go through a different age assurance process for every unique site their kids visit. And it's equally unnecessary for every company to devise a compliant, secure, and reliable method for checking ages. An independent age-assurance tool created for the benefit of all must be simple to implement on any platform, and allow parents to set it up once and easily reuse it across most or all of the sites their kid uses.
  

With Bandio, we aim to exceed all of these expectations with our privacy-preserving, parent-friendly solution. Like a wristband to identify those 21 and over at a concert, Bandio allows parents to create an age band, which is a reusable digital token that communicates a user's age range anonymously to participating sites and apps.

When parents go to Bandio.com, they'll confirm that their child's age falls within a specific range, or "band." After this one-time confirmation, Bandio will confirm their child's age simply and anonymously any time kids hit gated, age-sensitive content on a participating site. We don't collect birth dates and don't save copies of any information that parents provide. And the age band lives on the parent's device, not on any servers.

Sending a message to the industry

It's our hope that the U.S. will enact laws to ensure that companies protect kids online. And if legislation does require age assurance, it is our hope that Bandio will make it easy for sites to comply with current and future regulations, and to enable developers to design safer experiences for kids going forward.

But parents and caregivers who create age bands for their kids can become powerful advocates for a more age-appropriate digital world. Creating an age band now sends an important message to industry platforms and legislators that these tools aren't too difficult for families to use, and that parents actively seek and demand safer experiences for their families.

Once they've seen how age bands work for their kids, we hope parents will ask their kids' favorite platforms to accept Bandio and urge developers to create more age-aware experiences.

Age assurance can be easy and private, and the technology to do this at scale is here. Let's make it simple for sites to know that our kids are kids and our teens are teens.

Bandio is a public benefit corporation created by Common Sense Media and Aleo Foundation. It's supported by a group of leading technologists, internet activists, and committed parents who are passionate about fostering safer experiences for kids online without compromising parent and child privacy. Learn more at bandio.com.