Canada approves national standard for age verification, estimation

3 months ago 22

Canada is taking it place in the increasingly-crowded queue to implement online age assurance requirements, with a national standard approved Thursday by the Standards Council of Canada.

The CAN/DGSI 127: 2025, Age Verification — Age Assurance Technologies is expected to be published to the Digital Governance Council’s website in the next couple of weeks, according to information shared with Biometric Update.

The page for the standard states that it “specifies minimum requirements for age assurance technologies and methods to verify a person’s age or estimate their age range.”

CAN/DGSI 127 requires that organizations implementing age assurance start by performing a Child Rights Impact Assessment (CRIA). The standard sets out minimum requirements for the effectiveness of age assurance technologies and methods, guidelines for risk assessments and compliance with the standard and criteria for selecting a suitable age assurance method for a given application. It also provides principles for designing age assurance technologies and protocols for carrying out age checks.

The standard is intended to be platform-agnostic, and promote a reliable, privacy-preserving approach to age assurance.

The Digital Governance Standards Institute (DGSI) carried out a 60-day public review starting on December 4, 2024, and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) shared key insights from its exploratory consultation on age assurance in March, which highlighted the diversity of technologies that can be used for the same purpose, and a set of contentious considerations. It also suggested that biometric facial age estimation “deserves special caution – or could be preferable to age verification.”

A proposal to establish a legal basis for age verification, Bill S-210, was considered by Canadian lawmakers starting in 2021. It was approved by the Senate and passed the committee stage in the House of Commons Committee in 2024 after its second reading was completed in the lower chamber. The Bill died with the conclusion of the parliamentary session at the beginning of 2025.

DGSI argued at the time that Bill S-210 was too limited in scope to adequately protect Canadian children online.

A renewed effort to pass legislation has begun, taking into account some of the criticisms of the previous bill. The new bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, has explicitly referred to UK and EU efforts in making the case that the law is overdue, while DGSI’s announcement of the public review noted Australia’s adoption of age verification or estimation requirements for social media.