Know Your Children

What is Know Your Children?

Know Your Children is the process to verify the actual age and identity of individuals to provide or restrict access to age-restricted content, goods, and services. It guarantees secure customer onboarding and eliminates chances of any penalties for serving underage users. 

Verifying the age of online users is a regulatory as well as the moral obligation of merchants selling age-exclusive products. A solution based on ‘Know Your Children’ practices allows merchants of age-restricted services to provide tailored services keeping intact age verification laws and regulations.  

Why is Knowing Your Children Important?

Age Verification Regulations

If a business offers age-restricted services, it’s necessary to follow certain age-centered requirements. Lacking a ‘Know Your Children’ mechanism can put the business at a fair degree of non-compliance penalties from regulators. Age verification laws such as Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) ensure businesses stay focused on minor protection standards. Moreover, the GDPR’s Article 8 states the age of consent to be 16 that defines the fundamentals of age-related checks that businesses can adopt. 

Well-being of Minors

Since children are constantly learning new things at their growing age, they need supervision and care. Consumption of age-restricted products is not a good sign for any minor since it affects their mental health and well-being in the long run. Considering this, merchants providing such products online have a social responsibility as a service provider to restrict sales to children. These businesses can use a solution built on ‘Know Your Children’ criteria to ensure minor protection. 

Industries that need ‘Know Your Children’ Checks

Children are not able to decide for themselves whether a certain online product/service is suitable for them or not. Since the internet contains a wide array of content, they may end up on a website that offers age-limited services. Lack of proper age checks at these websites can get minors in trouble as they can easily get addicted to harmful and nefarious activities. In this regard, Know Your Children can make sure the user is of the right age, and providing them services won’t do any potential harm. 

Listed below are some sectors/industries that can benefit from Know Your Children checks: 

eSports

The e-gaming industry is quite popular among younger audiences. As it offers interactive and creative games for minors to grow and learn, there are some that are not purpose-built for underage consumption. Poker and R-rated games are particularly harmful to children since they come with a fair amount of violence and the possible influence of bad habits. 

Arms/Weapons 

When it comes to buying and selling weapons like arms, knives, and guns, safety measures are of prime importance. Restricting minors from accessing assault weapons is a corporate social responsibility. 

Alcohol and Tobacco

Underage consumption of narcotics, tobacco-based products, and alcohol is prohibited by law. Minors accessing online platforms is an increasing concern since they can easily use their parent’s credit cards to pay for a bottle of wine or buy e-cigarettes and vapes. Since minors are at their early age, it can deteriorate their health at scale. 

Online Shopping Platforms

E-commerce stores need to make sure they are providing services to the right customers of appropriate age. One big concern here is non-consented payments from minors that often lead to chargeback costs for the sellers. Having online age checks for e-commerce platforms is the need of the hour. 

Know Your Children Checks in the Digital Space

Document Verification

One way to make sure if an online user is above their right age is document verification. The process incorporates authentic ID documents that the user submits during the onboarding procedure. The document verification solution extracts important details like the name, date of birth to determine the appropriate age of the user. Using this solution, payment (credit/debit) cards can also be verified during checkouts that reduce the chances of minors transacting with their parents’ identity information. 

Facial Recognition

A Know Your Children process can incorporate facial biometric verification to find out if there is a grown-up or minor behind the system. Once the user submits their request to open an account or to perform a transaction, they are required to submit a selfie that authenticates them after comparing their existing profile information or the details provided on their ID. This can also help businesses take down fraudsters using synthetic identities to bypass the system. Facial biometric authentication prevents minors from accessing age-exclusive products and services and ensures Know Your Customer standards.