Solving Youth Compliance: New York

Understanding New York’s SAFE for Kids Act Proposed Rules and How k-ID Supports Compliance

AuthorAuthor

Joe Newman & Crystal Wong
September 23, 2025

On September 15, 2025, the New York Attorney General released proposed rules for the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act — a law designed to protect children’s mental health by restricting access to algorithmically personalised (“addictive”) social media feeds and nighttime notifications for users under 18, except where verifiable parental consent is obtained. The Proposed Rules provide more guidance how affected companies should determine users’ ages and obtain verifiable parental consent, establishing clear standards for compliance.

Developed with substantial public input from the August–October 2024 consultation, the Proposed Rules have re-opened for further public comment and are not yet finalised. k-ID is closely monitoring these regulatory developments, and regularly evaluating our own readiness for compliance. In this article, we outline how k-ID is preparing to help companies meet the two key requirements of the Proposed Rules — recognising that the details may evolve as the rule-making process concludes.

Age Assurance

- Social media companies must ascertain that the user is an adult (18+) before allowing them to access algorithmic feeds and/or nighttime notifications. Companies may confirm a user’s age using a number of existing methods, as long as the methods are shown to be effective and protect users’ data.

- At least one other alternative to a government-issued ID must be offered.

- Any information used to determine age or obtain parental consent must not be used for any other purpose, and must be deleted or de-identified immediately after its intended use.

- Young users who turn 18 must have an option to update their age status on the platform.

- Social media companies must choose an age assurance method with a high accuracy rate, conduct annual testing, and retain the results of the testing for a minimum of 10 years.

k-ID’s AgeKit+ allows you to customise and combine multiple verification methods tailored to your specific use case — enabling you to apply region-specific method(s) exclusively for the US or New York (if desired) while employing a different approach in other parts of the world.

🌊 You can build a waterfall of methods by sequencing the age assurance process to start, for example, by routing users through facial age estimation (FAE); only if the user is unable to complete FAE successfully would they be asked to undergo age verification by ID scan.

Some of the core methods we support are briefly explained below.

🧑‍🦱✨ Facial Age Estimation

Through its partners, k-ID provides world-class, facial age estimation (FAE) technology, complete with a variety of anti-spoofing measures — including active liveness checks, screen and device edge monitoring, face swap detection, and detection of a virtual camera. This technology holds the Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) EAL3 certification level.

The FAE solution provided by Privately conducts FAE entirely on-device, meaning no biometric data ever leaves the user’s device. It’s privacy-preserving by design, and avoids sharing sensitive personal data with external servers. k-ID also supports other methods of FAE that rely on server-side processing as well.

🔑 Users can verify once and re-use it across different platforms

AgeKey is an anonymous age credential bound to a FIDO passkey on the user’s device. While traditional systems asks the user to prove their age every time they want to access restricted content or services, an AgeKey is created once and stored on the user’s trusted devices, where it can be reused anywhere that supports it.

🪪 ID Scan

k-ID partners support a comprehensive range of legitimate government-issued ID document worldwide, including passports, driving licences, residence permits, national identity cards, etc. The advanced scan technology leverages OCR and AI-enhanced data extraction combined with proprietary data interpolation for high accuracy. We recommend adding a face match step comparing the ID photo with a live selfie in order to meet the NY AG’s requirements for anti-circumvention.

👉 Explore our AgeKit Plus - Verification Stack in the interactive demo below, to see how k-ID’s customisable age assurance solutions can help you comply.

Verifiable Parental Consent

- Social media companies must first receive a minor’s approval to request parental consent for algorithmic feeds and/or nighttime notifications. Once a minor approves, the platform may seek verifiable parental consent to allow a minor to access algorithmic feeds and/or nighttime notifications.

- The platform may not block the minor from generally accessing the platform or its content — for example the ability to search — simply because they or their parent has refused to consent.

- Parents and minors must also have the option to withdraw their consent at any time.

Whether you prefer building your user experience from scratch, or opt for the simpler, quicker approach of embedding pre-built UI components (check out our recently launched Widgets), k-ID partners with you to deliver streamlined, configurable VPC flows.

Our solution ensures that access is not all-or-nothing — delivering age-appropriate experiences is the objective. With k-ID, you can give parents the ability to provide granular consent for algorithmic feeds and/or nighttime notifications, while still enabling access to other features where legally permissible. Additionally, granting access is not a one-time event; parents can continue to engage and adjust permissions through Family Connect, maintaining active involvement beyond their initial consent.

👉 Experience the Permissions Widget in action using the interactive demo below. The Permissions Widgets empowers parents to manage specific permissions related to their children’s access — this approach offers a streamlined, lighter-weight path to compliance, ideal for phased or minimal-impact adoption.

Conclusion

The SAFE for Kids Act marks a significant step toward safeguarding youth mental health by ensuring platforms limit potentially harmful, addictive social media features. As the Proposed Rules develop, k-ID is committed to providing innovative, flexible, and privacy-preserving compliance solutions.

👉 Ready to explore youth compliance in the US? Contact us or explore our Developer Docs to get started.