Implementation

Bandio is Common Sense Media's privacy-preserving age check process. Simple to implement, it is a low friction way to get a proxy “date of birth” for a user.

It can be used in place of your existing user-reported date of birth. While the Bandio proxy “date of birth” is not the user’s actual date of birth, it is a privacy-preserving alternative that meets compliance requirements.

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Happy mother and daughter at tablet. Free range within your age range

Common Use Cases

User-Driven Use Cases

Parents want to proactively make sure that the site has their child’s actual age, not whatever age their child provided on sign up.

User wants to make sure that the site knows their age so the user can take advantage of age-specific experiences and/or benefit from age-appropriate safety features

Site-Driven Use Cases

When a user creates an account on the Site

When a user tries to do something that is age-gated

When a user tries to do something that is age-specific (e.g., “for 13-14 year olds only”)

When a user requests to change their age (e.g, “I mistyped my age…”)

When Site suspects that the user is underage and shouldn’t even have an account

When Site suspects that the user’s reported age is meaningfully higher than their actual age (e.g., reported = 28, suspected = 13)

Steps to Implement

Implementing User-Driven Use Case

Trigger – User proactively provides their existing Bandio Age Band to your site by clicking on your logo on the Bandio.com site

Site creates a page for Bandio users

Site interprets the incoming information from Bandio, which has the user's proxy date of birth (see below) in it

Site calls a Bandio API to verify the age band is genuine and the age band information has not been altered after it was created

Site adds the proxy date of birth as additional information about the user in their profile (If your site doesn’t require logins, then you skip this step)

Site adjusts settings so they are legally and otherwise appropriate for the given age

Site provides feedback to the user that the age information has been recorded and age-appropriate settings have been set.

Bandio provides an example code with the above functionality.

Implementing Site-Driven Use Cases

On the selected parts of Site, add the Bandio button using a code snippet that we supply.

If the user already has a Bandio age band, the user clicks a button to "Share my age band”. See steps 2-6 above.

If the user does not have a Bandio age band already, then the user clicks “Get child band” or “Get own band” and goes through the flow (<1 minute) to create an age band and share it with the Site. See steps 2-6 above.

Proxy Date of Birth

What is "proxy date of birth"?

This is the most conservative birthdate (DOB) for the given age range provided by the parent or user. So a 13 year old whose mom created a 13 year old age band for her on 5/20/2024 would have a proxy DOB as 5/19/2011.

Why not the user’s actual date of birth?

Parents and users alike don't want to provide actual dates of birth, so this is a way that preserves user privacy and still gets Sites the information they need for compliance, age appropriate design, and aging up.

Will it always lag the user’s actual age?

Given it is a proxy DOB and will always be conservative, a user who turns 18 and is especially eager to access 18+ content/features can always pro-actively provide a new Bandio age band. Sites can also choose to prompt a user to get an updated Age Band as appropriate (e.g., when there’s a 50% chance the user has turned 18).

Implementation

Common Use Cases

Steps to Implement

Proxy Date of Birth

Let's band togetherfor a Nicer Net.

Let's band together
for a Nicer Net.