Age as a Gatekeeper in the UK Online Safety Agenda

In the context of UK online safety, age has been given a central role. However, its use as a preventive measure to restrict children’s access to explicit or harmful material is also contested by advocates for children’s rights (van der Hof, Age assurance and age appropriate design: What is required? Parenting for a digital future. LSE, 2021) who champion the principles of capacity and agency underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Definitions of age verification and age assurance may vary, but both concern the management of digital identity. A decade after a growing consensus that there was no ‘one-size fits all’ single model that suits the diversity of all business needs (Nash et al., Effective age verification techniques: Lessons to be learnt from the online gambling industry. SSRN Electronic Journal, 26, 2012), case studies in this vignette aim to highlight some of the emerging unintended consequences and outcomes from their application in this still nascent field (Australian eSafety Commissioner, Inquiry into age verification for online wagering and online pornography. https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=a51bf3ce-be00-49a2-8118-a7c8f54a73ac , 2019), the challenge to the concept of online anonymity, and ask, who vets the gatekeepers? While providers and representative bodies such as the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) claim to contribute to creating a safer digital environment for children, they rarely address the protection of the full range of children’s fundamental rights or those of all users. The prioritisation of applying age verification technology as an outcome in the online harms/online safety agenda above other areas is also challenged by parents’ views of priorities suggested in family surveys (BBFC, Revealing Reality: Young people, pornography and age-verification (pp. 56–59), 2020; Ofcom, Internet users’ experience of potential online harms: Summary of survey research (pp. 15–19). Conducted by Jigsaw Research January-February 2020, 2020). The future of age as a gatekeeper in online safety is a global political agenda that affects not only children but raises questions about its wider purposes in the state control of identity, security, and informational power in a digital age.