Is an Age Verification Law on the Cards?
Published on 13 May 2009 at 4:23 pm.
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Filed under Misc, Age Verification.
Blog Author: Mark Owen
The purchase of many types of goods and services requires the purchaser to be of a particular age, usually 18 or over. The list of items includes many which are regularly referred to in political debate and in the press including various types of weapons, alcohol, remote gambling and adult material. With the growth and use of digital access devices such as mobile phones and PCs by children, there continues to be much political wringing of hands about the verification of the buyer’s age. A member of the House of Lords, Baroness Massey of Darwen has attempted to address this and has introduced a private members bill, the Online Purchasing of Goods and Services (Age Verification) Bill which would require anyone selling age-restricted goods and services over the internet to take steps to verify online whether the purchaser is old enough to buy them. The Bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords following a debate there on 8 May 2009.
The speeches both for and against were somewhat predictable. The “something must be done” lobby was loud but others responded by highlighting the danger of unthought through regulation and suggesting that real solutions to the issue of age verification are hard to come by. There still is no way of telling exactly how old someone is who is using one of these services.
There are several references in the speeches of their Lordships to a service run by www.192.com, which provides age verification. What this service does is compare the identity of someone trying to use the service with various records it has, most of which seem to be to do with working out who is 18 or not 18, such as the electoral roll. The service also records the telephone call by the person seeking to use the service and takes a “voice print” for use in later verification.
While the services are clever in their use of publicly available data, they still provide a fairly blunt instrument. They may enable services to identify who is or is not 18 but they cannot say exactly how old someone is. For many services which are directed at people under 18, it is important to be able to recognise the difference between say a 10 year old and a 14 year old as some services may be more suitable for one than the other. If there is no valid consent to service, then can the person providing it really feel comfortable that they are entitled to provide the service to that person and even that there is any enforceable agreement? These questions are not resolved by the current Bill. Until there is some solution to that, then the debate about age verification services is really only scratching the surface and it is difficult to see what the Bill would accomplish in practice. Various countries have tried different approaches, including the US requiring parents to fax confirmation of their children’s age and their consent to them accessing the service and Germany’s use of post office certification of over 18s.