Ensuring safer online experiences for Canadian kids and teens

At Google, we believe that kids deserve online experiences where they can learn, grow and discover safely, and that companies have a responsibility to both design for safety and take measures to ensure that young people have age-appropriate experiences on their platforms.

Recently, we introduced our age assurance technology, which is designed to help ensure youth have age-appropriate, privacy-preserving experiences across our platforms, by using machine learning to determine whether a user is over or under 18. In the coming days, we’ll begin to gradually roll out this technology in Canada, carefully monitoring progress as we expand its availability.

This is just one part of our broader commitment to online safety for Canadian families. We've continually invested in technology, policies and literacy resources to better protect kids and teens across our platforms. Our approach includes providing automatic safeguards for users under 18 with default settings and protections, expanding parental controls through Family Link and creating dedicated, age-appropriate experiences like YouTube Kids and supervised accounts.

We’re committed to setting a higher safety standard for all platforms, so Canadian parents have the confidence and control to choose better, safer online experiences for their children.

How Google’s Age Assurance Works

When our tools estimate a user might be younger than 18, we'll notify them via email and as they use Google products. These notifications explain how their settings have changed to provide default account protections, and, if the model is incorrect, how adults can verify their age to manage these settings themselves.

Age assurance helps us ensure that adults can access the information and services they need, while also applying the right protections for our younger users. Our approach to age assurance uses a combination of age estimation and, when necessary, privacy-protecting age verification methods.

• Age estimation: Our age estimation model uses machine learning to interpret a variety of signals already associated with a user's account, such as the types of information a user has searched for or the categories of videos they've watched on YouTube. These signals help us determine whether a user is likely over or under the age of 18. The age estimation model does not collect any new information not already associated with the user’s account.
• Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie.

Our age-appropriate protections in Canada

For users we identify to be under 18, we’ll automatically provide our existing enhanced protections to ensure age-appropriate experiences, such as:

• Turning on YouTube Digital Wellbeing tools like reminders to take a break and go to bed, and adding safeguards to content recommendations, including limiting repetitive views of some kinds of content.
• Disabling Timeline in Maps.
• Disabling personalized advertising and restricting age-sensitive ad categories.
• Preventing users we recognize as minors from accessing apps restricted to adults on Google Play.

A shared responsibility

Age assurance technology is becoming more widely available, and we're encouraged to see its increasing adoption by other companies in recent months. While some would like a system that imposes a universal arbiter of age, we believe that liability and responsibility rest with every service owner — the developer, the publisher, the app creator — because they know their users and services best.

We've designed our approach with user privacy in mind. It minimizes the need to collect additional data and ensures we are not sharing granular user information with apps and websites unnecessarily. We believe that a truly safer online environment requires input and investment from players across the entire ecosystem.

Implementing our age assurance technology in Canada is an important step to help ensure Canadian children have age-appropriate, privacy-preserving experiences across our platforms.