Age-assurance accuracy and appeals
Age assurance makes consequential boundary decisions. Services should measure how often children are treated as adults, adults as children, and legitimate users cannot complete the method—then provide a fast, equivalent alternative or appeal.
EDPB guidance links effectiveness, accuracy and accessibility to necessity and proportionality. No aggregate vendor metric replaces testing at the service's actual threshold and population.
For: trust-and-safety, model governance, privacy, accessibility and support teams. This is independent information, not legal, compliance or security advice.
Outcomes to measure
- False-adult and false-child outcomes.
- Uncertain/no-decision rate near the threshold.
- Failure to acquire and technical failure.
- Completion, abandonment and repeated attempts.
- Fallback use, appeal time and reversed decisions.
Fairness factors
Evaluate relevant age bands, skin tones, genders, disabilities, documents, devices, lighting and connectivity. Use lawful, privacy-conscious evaluation design and do not infer fairness from a dataset that does not represent the Irish service population.
Appeal design
- Tell the user the age check was inconclusive or failed.
- Offer another effective method rather than endless retries.
- Minimise new identity disclosure.
- Provide human assistance for accessibility and exceptional cases.
- Resolve before the protected opportunity becomes meaningless.
Change control
Re-test after model, threshold, SDK, capture, document, device or policy changes. Monitor whether a security response increases legitimate rejection and whether fallback becomes slower or more intrusive than the primary path.
Evidence and limits
MyID separates enacted rules, official implementation material, testing and vendor claims. A source can establish what its publisher says; it does not prove that every product, deployment or interpretation works as claimed. Where Irish implementation remains unsettled, this page says so.
Sources checked 22 August 2026. Re-check the linked primary material before making a consequential decision.
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