GoKawiilAge checks are becoming law worldwide. The question is no longer whether platforms verify age, but what happens to the faces they collect -- and whether they need to collect them at all.
By Ricardo Amper, Founder & CEO, Incode Technologies
More than 30 age assurance laws are now in force worldwide. The UK is enforcing the Online Safety Act's "highly effective" age check requirement, with restrictions on under-16 access to social media planned for spring 2027.
Australia's under-16 rules took effect in December, and the government has signaled its intent to double maximum fines to $99 million after early waves of non-compliance. Brazil's Digital ECA became enforceable in March 2026, now half of U.S. states now mandate some form of age verification.
Facial age estimation has emerged as one of the most accessible ways to comply. It needs no government ID and no database lookup, which makes it workable for users of all age groups, including those with no documents to show.
In regulated markets, Incode's data shows users choose it eight out of ten times over other age assurance methods. But it asks people for one of the things they feel least comfortable sharing: their face. And until now, nearly every implementation has worked the same way -- capture the face, send it to a server, run the estimate there.
The problem with server-based age estimation
The record shows why that is a growing liability, especially for vendors relying on third party tech stack. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center's 2025 Annual Data Breach Report, the U.S. recorded 3,322 data compromises last year -- a record high and a 79% increase over five years -- while supply-chain breaches doubled over the same period.
The same organization found that 63% of consumers have expressed serious concern over biometric data collection.
Meanwhile, the attacks are scaling faster than the defenses. Across more than 7 billion identity verifications processed on its platform, Incode has tracked the rise of agentic fraud -- fraud attempts carried out with the help of AI agents.
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