Age verification

Confirming someone is old enough, usually from an ID or trusted record.

For example, a site selling age-restricted products might ask a customer to photograph a driver's license, and the service reads the date of birth to confirm the customer is over the required age.

Establishing a date of birth or age threshold from a verified document or authoritative data source. The goal is to answer a narrow question, such as "is this person over 18?", with evidence a regulator would accept.

Services can establish age in several ways:

• ID document checks read the date of birth from a government-issued ID after confirming the document is genuine.
• Record checks match a person's details against credit bureau or government records that include date of birth.
• Digital credentials from a digital identity wallet can prove a person is over a threshold without revealing the birth date itself.

Age verification is one part of age assurance, the umbrella term for methods of establishing age, which also includes age estimation. It sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Age estimation predicts a rough age from a signal such as a selfie, without collecting an ID.
• Identity verification (IDV) proves who someone is, while age verification only needs to prove how old they are.

For more, see Age Verification for Adult Content Websites and How to Use an Age Verification System?