The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is encouraging websites to use age-verification tools and has issued a new policy statement on the collection of personal data to determine a user's age.

In the policy statement, the US competition regulator promises not to bring an enforcement action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) against websites and online service operators that collect, use, and disclose personal information solely to determine a user’s age using age-verification technologies.

The COPPA legislation requires owners of commercial websites and online services to notify parents of users under 13 that they’re collecting their children’s personal information and to obtain the parents’ consent before collecting and using this data.

Age-verification technology plays a pivotal role in helping parents navigate the challenges associated with monitoring their children’s online activities. However, during online age verification, information from minors can also be collected, which has led to questions from companies about whether this violates COPPA legislation, the FTC states.

“Age-verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades. Our statement incentivizes operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online,” Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.

The competition regulator emphasizes that certain conditions must be met. For example, information provided for age verification can’t be used for other purposes, such as marketing or offering personalized ads.

Secondly, the information may not be retained longer than necessary to determine a user’s age and must be deleted thereafter. In addition, the collected information must be adequately protected. Therefore, reasonable security safeguards must be taken to achieve this.

Lastly, parents and children must be clearly informed about exactly what information is being collected to determine a user’s age.

Over the past few months, the implementation of age-verification tools has caused a lot of ander and criticism in the online community.

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Pavel Durov, co-founder and CEO of Telegram, recently expressed his concerns about the Spanish government’s plans to introduce age restrictions and age verification for social media, calling it a “dangerous” new regulation and a doorway to public surveillance and mass data collection.

Earlier this week, Discord admitted that it made mistakes when rolling out age verification. Therefore, the online platform announced to temporarily pause the global expansion of age verification until the second half of 2026.

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