Age Verification, Estimation, Assurance, Oh My! A Guide to the Terminology

If you've been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and the globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating—they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences matter a lot when we're talking about your rights, your privacy, your data, and who gets to access information online.

So let's clear up the confusion. Here's your guide to the terminology that's shaping these laws, and why you should care about the distinctions.

Age Gating: “No Kids Allowed”

Age gating refers to age-based restrictions on access to online services. Age gating can be required by law or voluntarily imposed as a corporate decision. Age gating does not necessarily refer to any specific technology or manner of enforcement for estimating or verifying a user’s age. It simply refers to the fact that a restriction exists. Think of it as the concept of “you must be this old to enter” without getting into the details of how they’re checking. 

Age Assurance: The Umbrella Term

Think of age assurance as the catch-all category. It covers any method an online service uses to figure out how old you are with some level of confidence. That's intentionally vague, because age assurance includes everything from the most basic check-the-box systems to full-blown government ID scanning.

Age assurance is the big tent that contains all the other terms we're about to discuss below. When a company or lawmaker talks about "age assurance," they're not being specific about how they're determining your age—just that they're trying to. For decades, the internet operated on a “self-attestation” system where you checked a box saying you were 18, and that was it. These new age-verification laws are specifically designed to replace that system. When lawmakers say they want "robust age assurance," what they really mean is "we don't trust self-attestation anymore, so now you need to prove your age beyond just swearing to it."

Age Estimation: Letting the Algorithm Decide

Age estimation is where things start getting creepy. Instead of asking you directly, the system guesses your age based on data it collects about you.

This might include:

• Analyzing your face through a video selfie or photo
• Examining your voice
• Looking at your online behavior—what you watch, what you like, what you post
• Checking your existing profile data

Companies like Instagram have partnered with services like Yoti to offer facial age estimation. You submit a video selfie, an algorithm analyzes your face, and spits out an estimated age range. Sounds convenient, right?

Here's the problem, “estimation” is exactly that: it’s a guess. And it is inherently imprecise. Age estimation is notoriously unreliable, especially for teenagers—the exact group these laws claim to protect. An algorithm might tell a website you're somewhere between 15 and 19 years old. That's not helpful when the cutoff is 18, and what's at stake is a young person's constitutional rights.

And it gets worse. These systems consistently fail for certain groups:

• People of color are routinely misidentified (even Yoti's own research admits higher error rates for darker s