Age assurance requires sociotechnical process not just technical checks

Reconceptualizing Age Assurance as a Sociotechnical Problem: Connecting Evidence, Evaluation, Claims, and Decisions

Human-Computer InteractionComputers and Society

Summary

Age verification is usually seen as a technical problem of checking if someone is a child or not. The authors show that this is too narrow because age assurance involves how evidence is judged, how age claims are made, and how decisions are taken about access or rights. They reviewed many studies and found that different systems use different methods and ideas of age, with bigger focus on rights and privacy than on accuracy or fairness. They present a new framework that treats age assurance as a combined social and technical process connecting evidence, claims, evaluations, and decisions.

What this means in practice

  • For policy makers: Develop more comprehensive age assurance policies that include sociotechnical aspects beyond just technical verification methods.
  • For privacy compliance teams: Design age assurance solutions that consider privacy, rights, and institutional accountability, not just accuracy metrics.

A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.

Authors

Renkai Ma, Prakriti Dumaru, Thomas Synaepa-Addison, Jess Kropczynski, Pamela J. Wisniewski

Abstract

Age verification is often treated as a technical problem: can a system determine a child's age accurately? We argue this framing is too narrow. Age assurance becomes consequential when evidence is evaluated, translated into age-related claims, and used to decide whether a person can access, purchase, or belong. We review 85 publications on children's age assurance published from 2020 through February 2026. We find that shared terms such as age verification describe different processes. Age is represented as threshold eligibility or inferred estimation, and the same eligibility claim can arise from different evidence and components. Rights, access, and privacy receive more attention than accuracy, error, and fairness; yet institutional actors are rarely connected to system failures or user remedies, an accountability gap. We introduce the Age-Assurance Process Framework, which treats age assurance as a sociotechnical process connecting evidence, evaluation, claims, and decisions rather than reducing it to a technical problem.
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