What is AgeGO, and is it safe to use?
This has led to a flurry of interest in the best VPNs in order to avoid the age verification laws altogether, as well as increased search terms for specific age verification services, including AgeGO.
Here's a look at what AgeGO is, how it works and whether or not it is safe for you to use.
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AgeGO is an online age verification service. On the front page of its website, it claims that using it will allow users to "access all [their] favourite sites without re-verifying," but this is only true if the site they are trying to access uses AgeGO as an age verification service.
According to its website, AgeGO was founded in Barcelona in 2019 and is a part of EXOGROUP, an investment company also based in Barcelona.
With age verification now compulsory across a number of different sites and social media platforms in the U.K., it is understandable that U.K. citizens would be looking for a quick, easy and secure way to verify their age.
However, with this rise in demand, there will no doubt be a rise in companies looking to take advantage of this demand.
So, is AgeGO legit, or is it trying to take advantage of a trend?
AgeGO employs a number of different methods to verify users' ages, including:
Naturally, each of these methods require you to give some form of personal information to AgeGO in order to verify your age, from your phone number to more sensitive information like your credit card details or a scan of your photo ID.
Additionally, it's important to note that AgeGO uses third parties to verify your identity for each of its age verification methods. The only third party that is disclosed is Yoti, a London-based age verification and digital ID provider, which is used to verify digital IDs through AgeGO.
This lack of disclosure raises questions about the integrity of these third parties, and what their own privacy policies state with regards to the collection and storage of users' personal information.
In its own words, AgeGo's age verification methods are "free for the end users, secure and respect end user privacy by fully protecting their identity and data."
In practice, this means that AgeGO does not access, view or store any data submitted by users to verify their age, whether this is a picture of their face, a scan of ID, their credit card number or their phone number. It is also compliant with EU and U.K. age data privacy laws.
However, AgeGO employs the use of third-party providers in the age verification process in order to ensure that it only receives the result of the verification, and none of the data provided to it. This adds an extra layer of anonymity between yourself and the site you are trying to access, as the third party that verifies your age will only see that you have been redirected from AgeGO.
So, while AgeGO does not access your personal data at any time in the verification process, these third parties that are used for all of its age verification methods do. It is unclear what these third parties are, as they are not named in AgeGo's privacy policy.
Due to this, it's impossible to verify their own data privacy and security policies. This means that you do not know what happens to your personal data after it is used to verify your age.
Additionally, there is the caveat that AgeGO's age verification service is only useful if you're trying to use a site that uses AgeGO for age verification. If you were hoping to verify your age in one central location and use this across the internet, then unfortunately, this is not possible.
This is due to the Online Safety Act requiring that sites and social media platforms themselves put "technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair" age verification processes in place. This means that both the age verification techniques and third parties used to verify your age will vary from site to site.
Overall, there are some questions around the third parties AgeGO uses, what they do with your data and whether or not it is secured properly when being processed by said third parties.
Tom's Guide reached out to AgeGO for clarification, but at the time of writing, it has not provided any comment.
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
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