The United States continues to add new wrinkles to the privacy landscape, especially with respect to children’s privacy and safety. One interesting development generating a great deal of discussion are a handful of state laws — such as the ones passed by Texas, Utah, Louisiana, and California — that impose new obligations for app store platforms to perform age verification on their users, and to pass along those age signals to their developers. (Similar requirements are also included in Brazil’s ECA Digital, which becomes effective in March 2026. Read our Brazil blogpost here.)

Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are just a few of the platforms starting to roll out their age signals, and in some cases, these platforms are explicitly requiring their developers to use their signals for users in the affected jurisdictions. Making matters more complicated, not all platform age signals work the same way: for example, Apple and Google’s APIs send an age range with upper and lower boundaries, whereas Meta and Microsoft send age categories (“child,” “teen,” “adult,” “unknown”), leaving the developer to extrapolate based on the user’s jurisdiction what experience to provide. 

How can developers comply with these new requirements, while still maintaining compliance? Good news — we’ve made some updates to the Compliance Development Kit (CDK) to handle this.

How to Interpret Platform-Provided Age Signals with k-ID

We’ve created a new API, /age-gate/get-platform-age-range, specifically for receiving trusted external age signals that provide age categories rather than numerical values. Using this API, you can provide the user’s jurisdiction, the platform sending the age signal, and the category of age received, and our system will extrapolate the relevant age range for that user. For example, for a French player identified by Meta as a “Teenager,” a request would look something like this:

{
  "jurisdiction": "FR",
  "platform": {
    "name": "meta-horizon",
    "category": "TN"
  }
}

This request will return an ageLow and ageHigh parameter, drawing from k-ID’s Regulatory Hub mapping of how a “child” is defined under the relevant jurisdiction’s law. In this case, the output would read:

{
  "ageHigh": 17,
  "ageLow": 15
}

This is because French law defines “teenagers” as 15-17, in contrast to other jurisdictions like the US that define them as 13-17. Using the /age-gate/get-platform-age-range API therefore provides a more accurate age range compared to logic that simply tags all teenagers as 13 year olds. 

Using the Extrapolated Age Range to Power Compliance

Once you’ve extracted an age range for a user, either from the API or if received directly by the platform, you have a few options:

1. You can ask the user directly to provide their exact age, limiting the acceptable user responses to the range extrapolated from the signal; OR

2. You can simply input the ageLow value, along with the user’s jurisdiction, as part of your /age-gate/check request, and continue from there.

As always, the /age-gate/check will return details of what the age-appropriate experience is for the given user, based on the age they’ve provided. 

Conclusion

k-ID is always looking to expand and improve its offerings to keep pace with new developments in the law and industry practice. Contact us if you would like to learn more about using our new system to power your compliance needs.

👉 Ready to get started? Contact us or explore our Developer Docs to get started.