CAN/DGSI 127, Age Assurance Technologies is open for Public Review until February 21st, 2025. The standard specifies minimum requirements for age assurance technologies and methods to verify a person’s age or estimate their age range
Any interested party may comment on the proposed National Standard of Canada for Age Assurance Technologies by visiting the DGC website. All comments submitted will be compiled and dispositioned by the Technical Committee at a future meeting to be scheduled following the closing of the public review period.
The committee that developed the draft national standard for Age Assurance Technologies included a range of voices. The age assurance and digital identification industries were well represented, as were industry associations, big tech, government, and social media platforms. Privacy concerns were raised by the Privacy & Access Council of Canada; but representation of parents, children, and civil society was notably sparse.
The final outcome of the endeavor will be a national standard for age assurance technologies. Having such a standard available will facilitate efforts to regulate access to the internet and social media such as the proposed Bill S-210, An Act to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material. That law would require organizations that provide “Internet access, Internet content hosting or electronic mail” to limit access to sexually explicit material made available for commercial purposes by verifying each user’s age — using “prescribed age-verification methods — and retain details to be able to prove they had verified each user’s age.
Privacy issues surrounding age-verification were raised by Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, which stated that, “the way many jurisdictions worldwide…have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
The deadline for comments on the proposed Canadian national standard for Age Assurance technologies is February 21, 2025.
Comments on the draft are open to anyone. Share the notice of public review with your networks.
A similar effort was undertaken by the ISO to set out “a common framework for age assurance systems deployed for the purpose of enabling age-related eligibility decisions by anybody for any reason in any location through any type of relationship between an individual and the provider of any product, content or service that has policy requirements for acquiring assurance about the age of persons (such as the supply of liquor, tobacco, weapons or online content).
Age-related eligibility decisions are based on the fact that a person must either be older or younger than a given threshold age or be within an age range, where ages are counted in years and where these criteria are dependent upon the type of goods, content or service to be provided.
Age Assurance Systems are established and operated by identity service providers or attributes attestation providers, or may be deployed internally by the providers of age-restricted products, content or services. This document aims to solve the problem of inadequately defined age assurance processes and associated lack of trust and no recognised benchmark against which the systems can be scored interms of efficacy, privacy and security.
Age Assurance is the broadest term for methods to discern the minimum, maximum or actual age or age-range of a person. Services within the Age Assurance sector may also be described as one more of ‘Age Verification’, ‘Age Estimation’ or ‘Age Assessment’.
• Age Verification is a sub-set of age assurance that refers to the process of age determination by reference to identity attributes associated with a person.
• Age Estimation is a sub-set of age assurance that refers to the process of assessment that an individual is likely to fall within a category of ages, over a certain age or under a certain age by reference to assurance components, inherent features or behaviours related to that individual.
• Age Assessment is a sub-set of age assurance that is used to refer to an analysis carried out by a trained professional that takes into account a person’s appearance, demeanour, background and credibility. Although an individual’s age is an attribute of their identity, it is not necessarily the case that establishingthe full identity of an individual in a global context is needed to gain age assurance. As such, the process of age assurance may in some instances be connected to connected to identity verification, but can also be performed in ways other than via identity verification.
