The Digital Trust & Safety Partnership Releases Guiding Principles and Best Practices for Age Assurance 

WASHINGTON — Today the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership, a first-of-its-kind initiative aimed at promoting a safer and more trustworthy internet, unveiled a new report identifying guiding principles and best practices for age assurance online. 
 
The report describes a range of best practices — specifically, five guiding principles for age assurance and three dozen examples of best practices in line with those principles.
 
“Providing age-appropriate online experiences is a key component of digital trust and safety. But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution — different providers and products for users with very different expectations will need to adopt different approaches to age assurance,” said DTSP’s Executive Director David Sullivan.
 
“Every approach to age assurance presents trade-offs. More accurate methods may require more collection of user data, or potentially lead to inequitable outcomes for users’ ability to access online products and services,” he continued.
 
DTSP has identified overarching age assurance principles and practices that may be deployed as part of the overall DTSP Best Practices Framework. Because there is no single solution, the specific practices that services use may vary by digital product or feature and evolve with both the challenges faced and advances made in age assurance technologies, as well as with evolving regulations. The Partnership hopes that by presenting this framework, we can help support effective practices across the digital ecosystem.
 
For more information, please visit dtspartnership.org. Members of the press can contact the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership at press@dtspartnership.org.