Teen and Parent Perspectives on Approaches to Age Verification
Age verification (AV) is being rolled out by online services to comply with new laws in Europe and across states in the United States. Proposed legislation at the federal level in the U.S., such as the Kids Off Social Media Act and the Kids Online Safety Act, may also result in increased adoption of AV systems. Researchers at CDT interviewed 17 families and a total of 45 participants as part of a study aimed at understanding parents’ and teenagers’ perspectives on different approaches to AV. Grounded in a human-centered framework that emphasizes the experiences, concerns, and priorities of real users, this research brief highlights our findings regarding participants’ perspectives and preferences on common methods to verify age. This topic is part of a larger study of proposed interventions to protect young people online which will be published in a forthcoming research report by CDT.
Overall, when presented with common approaches to AV using storyboards, parents and teenagers raised concerns related to sensitive data privacy and efficacy, and emphasized the need for transparent and context-driven approaches that support user agency and choice, alongside parental discretion when determining young people’s access to online services.
This work is part of a larger forthcoming research report that will be released in the fall of 2025.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
