A safer digital experience for families across the United Arab Emirates

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

Today, we’re bringing age assurance technology to the UAE, the latest in our ongoing investment in technology, policies and resources to better protect kids and teens across our platforms. The technology, which is being rolled out gradually, uses machine learning to determine whether a user is over or under 18 by looking at a variety of signals already associated with a user’s account – for example, the types of information they’ve searched for or the categories of videos they've watched on YouTube.

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

• Disabling personalized advertising and restricting age-sensitive ad categories.
• Preventing access to apps restricted to adults on Google Play.
• Disabling Timeline in Maps.
• 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.

Age assurance helps us ensure that adults can access the information and services they need, while applying the right protections for our younger users. 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.

We’re committed to setting a higher safety standard across our platforms, whether that's providing flexible parental controls through Family Link, creating dedicated, age-appropriate experiences like YouTube Kids and supervised accounts, or using our advanced machine learning models to play our part towards a better, safer online experience for everyone.