Online services can now guess a user’s age with as little as a selfie or a phone number, according to leading age assurance providers. Age estimation providers in particular claim their processes are easy and, because they don’t seek to tie anyone’s identity to their estimated age (or use only existing data to make their guess), privacy-protective. As a result, policymakers are increasingly seeing age estimation as a potential panacea that enables providers to determine a user’s age while preserving their privacy, anonymity, and safety.

Even without legal requirements, companies are increasingly implementing methods to determine users’ ages. For example, just last month, Google committed to using machine learning methods to guess age, including analyzing users’ online activity such as sites browsed and YouTube videos watched. Apple is equipping parents and caregivers with tools to add their children’s ages when setting up an iCloud account, and to age-gate access to apps at the App Store level.