Mr. Tiernan Kenny:

I might come in on age assurance and age verification. With regard to age assurance, the most important part is the effectiveness of the measures a platform puts in place. You could look at age assurance as a kind of umbrella term for a range of techniques that are available either to estimate or verify somebody's age. There are varying levels of friction involved with different approaches. There are obviously privacy considerations around some of them as well. Age verification is more at the firmer end where you are able to positively identify who a person is and what is their exact date of birth. There are other techniques such as age estimation. If you have ever used online banking, you might find they try to get you to take a picture of yourself, or something where you move your head. There are some services that can use that to estimate your age to a reasonably high degree of accuracy. That does not involve them having to know who you are.

There is work ongoing at an Irish and at a European level. The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer is developing a digital wallet based on the MyGovID.

It is possible that this could provide a service whereby you would get it to produce a token that you would be able to show to a website that would tell it you are over a certain age. It would have to start at 16 because that is when you get the code. In theory, however, it could be any age over 16. That is privacy preserving because the website or platform does not have to know who you are; it just has to know you have verified your identity with a trusted entity. The website can effectively take that token as a guarantee you are the right age to access the content on it.

There is also the second round of the European digital identity regulation, the purpose of which is to try to bring that in on a pan-European basis. The Commission is developing a white label pilot app that is being tested in, I think, four countries, namely France, Spain, Portugal and either Italy or Greece. I can look that up afterwards. Again, the intention is to give users a frictionless way to prove they are above a certain age while respecting their privacy. You would expect more of those solutions-----