More than 600 experts from around the world are meeting this week at the Global Age Assurance Standards Summit (GAASS) half of them onsite while the other half are taking part remotely. The meeting’s purpose is to find out and discuss benefits and pitfalls of different tools in place to gain knowledge on the age of Internet users.

In the course of the week various concepts, approaches, methods and tools to estimate or verify either the identity or the age of a person will be presented in order to better understand the different requirements of online service providers, their users and businesses developing and providing verification service tools. In parallel a Working Group of the International Standards Organisation convenes in order to further develop a standard for Identity Management and Privacy Technologies.

Standards are perceived as a precondition not only for properly working tools but also for a level playing field market in this area. Also, regulators on national, European and international level have an important role to play when safety in the online world shall be based on true and verified information guaranteed by legislation.

Further issues to be discussed are the interoperability and attacks on the technical infrastructure, privacy preserving mechanisms of innovative tools and last but not least complementary mechanisms to keep children safe online.

So far it looks like what works in the tangible world seems not to be so easy in the digital environment. So, watch this space for further information and the Summit Communique to be published next week.