UK Online Safety Act Age Assurance Selection Workflow

Run the workflow as online-safety triage: service scope, user group, risk duty, code mapping, mitigation, evidence, owner, deadline, and Ofcom escalation. When choosing a method, use age verification where you need a stronger check on whether a user meets an age threshold, and use age estimation where a service needs to infer age from a lower-friction signal. If children are likely to access the service, take a risk-based approach to recognising age and either establish age with a level of certainty appropriate to the risks or apply the relevant standards to all users. If it is not appropriate for children to access the service, focus on preventing access.

A useful template captures service type, user group, risk type, child-access result, code measure, mitigation owner, evidence, review date, and unresolved assumptions.

Review the workflow after Ofcom code updates, feature changes, algorithm changes, user-base changes, incident trends, complaints, enforcement notices, or transparency-report cycles.