What Say You, AgeID – Pornhub’s In-House Age Verification Tool?

Per Engadget, AgeID asks people to create an encrypted login that verifies their age across compatible sites, saving them from having to prove they’re of-age every time they want to view adult content. The system will draw on third-party age verification companies, but Mindgeek (which owns Pornhub, which obvs draws the lion’s share of porn-seeking traffic on the interwebs today) promises that AgeID won’t store any personal info. It’ll only keep “standard technical data” to prevent fraud, as well as the protected login.

There are real questions to consider here, and Engadget raised the obvious: If there aren’t viable age verification alternative, Mindgeek and its brands may effectively determine how the U.K. and other nation states check ages. What mainstream news sources may not know though is that there are several age verification options unrolling onto the marketplace, including AgeID.

As part of this month’s in-depth exploration of age verification, we corresponded with representatives from the three major existing service providers — AV Secure, Age Checkedand AgeID. Here’s what James Clark, a spokesperson for AgeID, told us via email through a member of organization’s press team. 

YNOT: What are some specific age verification actions and initiatives that y’all are implementing?

James Clark: “Customers will always follow the path of least resistance.” A simple statement, but a vitally important one. Age verification will undoubtedly affect one of the adult industry’s most critical components – traffic. Without traffic, there’s no conversion, no advertising sales, no revenue. Throughout AgeID’s development over the last two years, we have kept this at the center of our thinking.

We anticipate verifying over 25 million U.K. adults within the first few days of launch, achieved in part due to our huge reach and site install base. This ensures that AgeID will very quickly become one of the most used age verification platforms in the U.K. for adult content. More importantly, sites which use AgeID will benefit greatly from the verified adult traffic levels it provides.

Our install base is only half the story. In order to get as many adults into AgeID as possible, we have to make the process fast and simple: Register > Choose a method > Verify once > browse any AgeID site without re-logging in.

It sounds simple, but optimizing that flow has been a constant evolution. Registration has to be fast, yet protect privacy and support anti-fraud. Our age verification methods must be broad, and we cannot leave any adult unable to verify their age. We therefore evaluated every age verification method on the market, worked with our partners to innovate new methods and considered customers switching devices or browsers, as well as turning on incognito mode, upgrading their phone, attempting fraudulent verifications, wishing to use login on shared devices — and that’s before we even moved on to designing the frontend and addressing the huge topic of privacy.

The amount of development hours that have gone into AgeID — with multiple engineers across multiple offices — is huge, and we’ve still got plenty more features and polish to come.

What does it take to implement these services – and who’s paying?

AgeID keeps it all simple — simple for the user, and simple for the merchant. We understand that site owners don’t want to spend time and money integrating an age verification product, so we re-evaluated our integration process and have recently been developing some incredibly fast ways for merchants to add AgeID to their sites with just a few clicks. These methods are still undergoing some internal testing but will be live later this quarter.

In terms of payment, we took the decision very early on not to pass the cost onto the customer, so we are completely free to end-users. We are also free to independent merchants based in the U.K. as they will be feeling the pressure of age verification more than many and we wanted to give them a leg up.

In order to maintain a robust, long-term age verification platform and offer our wide-range of age verification options, AgeID charges a licence fee to sites based outside the U.K. This fee varies depending on the size of the site. We have to make it affordable for all, with lighter users paying less. We consider this a fair approach and are not seeking to make money with AgeID, just to cover our costs. Our goal is traffic flow and retention of existing revenue.

How are these services being promoted?

AgeID will be used by the largest adult sites in the U.K. such as Pornhub, which guarantees extremely high awareness, usage and adoption. Once a user has verified their age, likely on a large tube site, if they visit any other adult site with AgeID, they simply get straight in the door just as they would now.

We are sponsoring multiple industry events both in the U.K. and abroad and advertising in trade press. AgeID is already the most talked about age verification platform for the adult industry, but it’s vital that all adult sites are made aware of age verification and the consequences of non-compliance. We also expect the regulator and the government to run their own messaging campaigns to fully prepare the public for what is expected to be one of the largest changes to the internet in the democratic world.

How do you confirm age when you can’t really confirm identity?

A great question. This isn’t simply a case of clicking “Yes, I am over 18.” — There has to be a robust age check using methodology approved by the U.K. regulator. AgeID simply has to know whether the person accessing age-restricted content is over 18. We neither need nor wish to know their identity. We therefore took the decision very early on to use 3^rdparties to age verify our users. A user chooses their preferred verification method from within AgeID, then leaves AgeID completely to input their information into their chosen, approved third party site. This ensures that AgeID cannot even see, let alone store, any data entered during the age verification process. The third-party then simply reports back a pass/fail flag to AgeID. No date of birth, no name — nothing more than over/under 18.

Since the law passed back in April 2017, many methods from various age verification providers have been put forward, with more entering the market even now. AgeID uses a wide range of multiple third-party age verification methods, all from many different companies. We do not want to rely on one supplier, one server or one method that could break and bring down the system.

AgeID gives real choice to the user and contains backup methods from different providers in case servers are flooded. Currently the guidance from the regulator has not been finalized, but they are expected to allow methods such as Mobile SMS, Credit Card, Passport, Driving Licence, plus several others we are keeping under AgeID’s hood for the time being.

Even with all that in place, there is certainly still the issue of consumer apprehension. How do you convince consumers that all this is safe and secure?

When a customer first creates an AgeID account, they provide an email address and password which is encrypted so that it cannot be reverse engineered and exposed in the highly unlikely event of a data breach… We are hugely mindful of public trust, and will shortly be releasing further information in this area.

Image via Ja Ty.