FTC enforcement policy statement on COPPA and age assurance technologies

The Federal Trade Commission issued an enforcement policy statement in February 2026 clarifying how online services can collect and use information from children for age assurance purposes without violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a move designed to incentivize platforms to implement age verification technologies. The policy statement functions not only as a shield against enforcement for businesses acting in good faith, but as an active tool to encourage deployment of age assurance protocols that determine which users are children before applying COPPA protections. The FTC is leveraging COPPA beyond data privacy violations, using the statute alongside unfair or deceptive acts and practices laws and age-appropriate design codes to challenge platform design choices that put children at risk, particularly features that use personal data such as recommender systems and push notifications. A recent settlement agreement with Meta requires the company to detect and remove children under age 13 from Facebook and Instagram, commitments that depend in large part on the age assurance protocols underpinned by the FTC enforcement policy statement.

Age verification establishes who is a child; it does not establish who is in danger. Guardii addresses the operational question the FTC settlement with Meta leaves open: once a platform knows a user is under 13, how does it detect which of those child users is being groomed, coerced, or extorted in a direct message before the abuse escalates to offline contact or self-harm. The anti-grooming detection module, developed by a Meta Business Partner with access to real-world platform threat intelligence, identifies the conversational cadence of an adult building trust with a child and isolating them from oversight, flagging the exchange to a parent or community safety team without requiring the child to self-report or a human moderator to read the conversation in full. By operating at the level of harmful patterns rather than age cohorts, the platform intercepts the abuse COPPA was designed to prevent, delivering on the safeguarding outcome the FTC policy statement is intended to incentivize.