Meeting Ofcom's Standards: How Emblem Compares to Other Age Verification Solutions

In January 2025, Ofcom published its comprehensive guidance on "highly effective age assurance" for online services. This framework establishes four essential criteria that age verification solutions must fulfill: technical accuracy, robustness, reliability, and fairness. As regulations tighten across global markets, websites need age verification solutions that not only comply with these standards but also maintain commercial viability and user privacy.

As a purpose-built age verification solution, Emblem was designed specifically to balance regulatory compliance with user experience and privacy protection. Let's examine how Emblem compares to other market solutions like SafePassage when evaluated against Ofcom's four key criteria.

Technical Accuracy: Privacy-First Design Without Compromising Effectiveness

Ofcom defines technical accuracy as "the degree to which an age assurance method can correctly determine the age of a user under test lab conditions." This foundational criterion ensures that solutions can distinguish between adults and minors with high confidence.

Emblem's AI-powered age estimation technology processes data entirely on the user's device, ensuring biometric information never leaves their control. Despite this privacy-first approach, our system achieves remarkably high accuracy, with less than 1% error rate in identifying users under 18. Our implementation includes a "challenge age" approach (similar to the offline "Challenge 25" protocol), where users near the threshold undergo additional verification.

By comparison, solutions like SafePassage offer a dual approach: a server-side option with 99.7% accuracy for identifying minors and a client-side option with 95.5% accuracy. While their server-side solution achieves marginally higher accuracy rates, it requires sending facial images to external servers for processing—creating additional privacy considerations and potential regulatory complications under various biometric information privacy laws.

Emblem's approach achieves the necessary accuracy threshold while maintaining stricter privacy protections—a critical consideration for websites serving global audiences subject to various privacy regulations.

Robustness: Real-World Resilience Against Circumvention

Robustness refers to a system's effectiveness in actual deployment contexts, particularly its resistance to circumvention attempts. The ideal solution maintains accuracy across various real-world conditions and prevents easily accessible workarounds.

Emblem's client-side document processing includes sophisticated liveness detection technology to ensure users are physically present during verification. This prevents circumvention through static photos or pre-recorded videos. Our system has been tested across diverse environmental conditions to ensure performance isn't degraded by factors like lighting or image quality.

SafePassage employs similar anti-circumvention techniques with liveness checks and document verification but implements them differently across their server-side and client-side models. Their approach relies more heavily on server-side processing for final verification decisions.

Emblem's purpose-built design specifically focuses on preventing circumvention methods that are readily accessible to children—maintaining robust protection without unnecessarily complex or intrusive verification steps that might reduce conversion rates.

Reliability: Consistent Performance from Trustworthy Evidence

Reliability encompasses both reproducibility (consistent results when given the same inputs) and the trustworthiness of evidence sources. Systems must produce dependable decisions based on reliable data.

Emblem's technology has been extensively tested across multiple environments to ensure consistent performance. Our machine learning models undergo regular retraining to prevent model drift, with comprehensive monitoring to ensure reproducible results.

For document verification, Emblem uses sophisticated authentication processes to verify security features, detect manipulation, and confirm document validity—all without storing sensitive personal data.

While solutions like SafePassage demonstrate similar reliability in controlled testing environments, their more complex implementation introduces additional variables. Their documentation reports reproducibility testing showing false negative rates ranging from 4.1% to 4.5% across multiple test runs.

Emblem's streamlined approach maintains high reliability while reducing complexity, resulting in a more elegant solution that achieves consistent performance without unnecessary overhead.

Fairness: Equal Protection Across Demographics

Fairness refers to a system's ability to perform equally well across different demographic groups, avoiding bias or discrimination in its outcomes.

Emblem's technology is trained on diverse datasets representing various ethnicities, ages, and genders. Our development process includes regular bias auditing to identify and address any performance disparities across demographic groups. This ensures that all users receive equal protection regardless of their characteristics.

SafePassage reports similar demographic testing with their accuracy rates varying slightly across different ethnicities (from 95.0% to 95.9%) and between genders (95.7% for males, 95.3% for females) in their client-side implementation.

Both solutions prioritize fairness, recognizing its importance not only for regulatory compliance but for effective protection of all users.

The Emblem Difference: Purpose-Built, Privacy-Focused, Commercially Viable

While various age verification solutions can meet Ofcom's criteria to different degrees, Emblem distinguishes itself through its purpose-built design focused specifically on age verification rather than adapted from broader identity verification systems.

This specialization allows Emblem to achieve up to 85% conversion rates across websites—significantly outperforming industry averages while maintaining high accuracy. Our privacy-first approach processes sensitive data on-device, reducing regulatory risk and enhancing user trust.

For websites looking to implement age verification that balances regulatory compliance with user experience, Emblem offers the optimal combination of effectiveness, privacy, and commercial viability.

Contact our team today to learn how Emblem can help your website comply with age verification regulations while maintaining commercial performance.