Face scans, bank checks and digital ID: how Ofcom wants to keep under-16s off social media

Teenagers trying to open Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat next spring could be asked to scan their face, hold up a passport or let their bank confirm how old they are, under recommendations published by the media regulator Ofcom.

The UK's social media ban, which is due to come into force in March, will prevent under-16s from accessing ten of the biggest platforms. Ofcom has now set out what it regards as the most effective ways of working out which of the UK's millions of social media users are old enough — and has admitted that a “large number” of adults are also likely to have to prove their age.

The proposals are subject to government approval, with a decision due by the end of the year.

Four methods

Checking whether someone is over 16 is much harder than checking whether they are over 18. Sixteen and 17-year-olds do not have credit cards or full driving licences and may not have passports, and teenagers can look significantly older or younger than they are.

Alongside traditional forms of ID, Ofcom has recommended four methods it says would be “highly effective” at gauging someone's age:

Photo ID matching, in which details from a document such as a passport are checked against a live image taken during the age check.

Banking-based checks, which use the information a bank or other financial institution already holds about a customer's age.

Facial age estimation, technology that estimates age from a picture of a person's face and which the regulator argues has improved recently.

Digital ID services, which let people prove who they are, or confirm a single fact such as their age, without handing over the whole document.

It will ultimately be up to the tech companies to decide how to carry out the checks. The onus is on the social networks to choose their own solutions and show that they comply.

‘Prescriptive rules didn't work’

Ofcom's chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, said the regulator was drawing on its experience of introducing tougher age checks for pornography websites last year.

“What we've learned in introducing age checks across the porn industry is that actually what a lot of countries did before us was say you need to do it this way and they were very prescriptive and it didn't work,” she told the BBC.

“So what we've said all along is here are things that can work, they must preserve privacy, they must protect people's data, but it's on you to put in place what you think works for you.”

Who should do the checking?

Some technology firms, including Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, have argued that age verification should happen at the level of the device, so that an under-age user would be blocked from installing social media apps through the app store in the first place.

That would hand much of the responsibility to Apple and Google, which between them run the operating systems on almost all of the world's smartphones. Apple has already introduced age verification in the UK. But Ofcom says device-level checks would not absolve social networks of their own duty to check users' ages.

Lessons from Australia

Australia introduced a similar ban last year, but many children there have found ways around it, including by using older relatives' accounts or tricking age-estimation tools. The UK government says it intends to take a tougher approach.

Ofcom itself accepts that “the risk of circumvention cannot be entirely eliminated” and that some children will succeed in getting past the checks. Privacy campaigners have also raised concerns about adults being asked to hand over biometric or financial data simply to keep using apps they already have.

‘The real prize’

Dame Melanie said making the ban work would require a joint effort from parents, schools and the platforms, not just the regulator.

“At Ofcom, what we will do is make sure that the services that the social media companies put in the checks that they need to,” she said. “That's our job, but the wider question about how everybody engages with this, it is for everybody, really.”

She said the real test would come years from now. “I actually think the real prize here is going to be for today's eight to 10-year-olds entering secondary school without it being the norm to go on Snap in your class group chat, without it being the norm to have all your sports fixtures organised on Instagram.”

The BBC has asked three of the UK's biggest banks whether they would help social media companies with age checks if the method is approved. For parents, the practical question is simpler: from March, children who are under 16 should expect their accounts on the biggest platforms to be challenged, and in many cases closed.