Getting Age Assurance Right: A Risk-Based Framework for High-Risk Online Features

Written by Public Knowledge's Sara Collins as a follow-up to the organization's earlier work on child online-safety policy, this paper shifts the debate from whether age assurance should be required to how it should be implemented. It identifies three policy failures the authors say currently jeopardize children's safety online, and proposes a risk-tiered framework under which the intensity of age-verification measures scales with the risk level of a given online feature, rather than applying blanket verification requirements across all services.

The paper is a policy-design analysis rather than an empirical study, intended to guide legislators and regulators toward calibrated, feature-specific rules. It concludes that treating all online features as equally risky leads to either over-restriction or under-protection, and that a tiered approach would better balance child safety with privacy and access for the range of users who encounter high-risk features.