Age assurance is not simple and it is not static. But it can be approached responsibly. This book is written for those who need to do so without illusions and without pretending that complexity can be avoided.
How can someone prove they are old enough to access something—whether that means buying alcohol in person, signing up for social media, or accessing restricted content online—without exposing more personal information than necessary?
This report provides a comparative legal analysis of platform regulation in six jurisdictions, namely Australia, the European Union (EU), India, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (UK). The analysis, reflecting regulatory developments as of June 2025, identifies emerging trends in online platform regulation and potential implications for children’s rights and safety online.
The UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records, commonly known as MLETR, is a proposal by UNCITRAL on how legislation in all jurisdictions shall be updated for digital in the interest of creating greatest possible interoperability on the legal layer. It addresses this challenge by proposing the assertion of reliable methods to achieve Integrity, Exclusive Control, and Singularity for electronic transferable records. Together these concepts form the legal foundation for ETRs.
Digital wallets are taking over in-store payments; biometric authentication is becoming an everyday habit. Issuers and acquirers need to ensure their pilots boost conversion while remaining sensitive to dynamic customer spending patterns
SECOIA builds identity systmes and writes about them
Foundational framing of what privacy is, why it matters, and how privacy concepts apply in the digital age — a useful anchor for everything else in this issue.
Legal paper proposing a duty of loyalty framework for privacy — shifting the obligation from individuals protecting themselves to institutions honoring trust.
And they’re calling it a robocall fix. On April 30, the FCC unanimously approved requiring every telecom provider — carriers, mobile operators, VoIP services, to verify your identity before activating service. It’s known in the industry as KYC (Know Your Customer).
The FCC is borrowing from banking’s anti-money-laundering playbook. They’re even asking whether carriers should retain your identity docs for 4 years after you leave and check you against law-enforcement watchlists. See also the official FCC KYC document.
Taken together, these trends reveal a widening gap between the speed of technological change and the pace of democratic governance. Unless governments act decisively, the current policy landscape risks normalizing and enabling AI-driven TNR rather than constraining it. Responding effectively will require sustained coalition building and rigorous collaboration across civil society, academia, governments, and international organizations. It demands rights-based, community-centered approaches that prioritize those most at risk, strengthened by international, participatory oversight mechanisms capable of monitoring violations and ensuring accountability. It also requires mandatory impact assessments, meaningful transparency from both governments and technology companies, and accessible remedies for those harmed.
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.
The modern world no longer suffers from information scarcity. It suffers from informational excess. Humanity now produces data at a velocity that exceeds unaided human cognition: in short; our collective dataset is 600+ trillion pieces of civilization information and 90% of it is useless. The problem is no longer whether information exists. The problem is whether humans can operationally navigate it.
GDPR fine on Yoti biometric storage signals a shift from “Capture, Store, Reuse” to “Verify, Prove, Discard” — biometrics stay on device, identity becomes cryptographic proof.
We claim that viewing sovereignty purely through the lens of infrastructure ownership misses the core issue: the crucial factor is who has the power to shape, govern, and challenge these systems. Since the concentration of power is a choice, not an unavoidable outcome, merely creating new asymmetries won't solve the problem. Leveraging the principle of digital self-determination, we propose a "stewardship architecture": a nuanced framework of engagements and oversight mechanisms rooted in existing EU law. This approach would allow Europe to prioritize agency, rather than mere ownership, as the true measure of its digital sovereignty, empowering its citizens and institutions in the process.’
