TruAge, the innovative, universally accepted age-verification system that makes it easier to more accurately verify an adult customer’s age when purchasing age-restricted products, and its core-technology have been incorporated into the latest W3C Verified Credentials, Verifiable Credentials 2.0, that were introduced today.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international council created in 1994 to create and publish web standards to ensure the growth and development of the web.

The new W3C Verified Credentials, which were ratified in late April by its governing body, are a comprehensive update to web standards and affirm that TruAge technology is the centralized standard for digital personhood, making TruAge the accepted standard for all applications that involve age verification.

“TruAge was developed to address strong consumer interest in using a trusted and reliable digital ID that combined consumer privacy and ease of use with the potential for mass retail integration—and it has delivered on that promise. It is very gratifying that W3C agrees with our vision and solution,” said Paul Ziv, TruAge’s vice president of technology and operations.

Verifiable credentials are increasingly important as communications and commerce continues to go digital, because they can contain all the same information as physical credentials, similar to driver’s licenses and other identification cards. Importantly, by adding technologies such as digital signatures, verifiable credentials can be tamper-proof and seen as more trusted than their physical counterparts.

Upwards of 95,000 convenience and fuel retailers who use Commander by Verifone or Passport by Invenco by GVR (formerly Gilbarco), along with other cloud-based systems such as PlatformPOS by Success Systems and Clover, are eligible to use TruAge in the United States. TruAge scans all U.S. driver’s licenses and is also incorporated into the State of California’s mobile driver’s license (mDL) and digital wallet. The W3C announcement makes TruAge the de facto standard for age verification that could be incorporated into all relevant code for pertinent products developed by companies including Microsoft and Apple.

While Verifiable Credentials 2.0 was approved to improve the ease of expressing digital credentials, there also were several privacy-preserving goals that were important; both of these objectives are central to the core of TruAge.

Developed by NACS, the global trade association representing the convenience and fuel retailing industry, and Conexxus—its standards-setting partner—TruAge transforms the traditional carding experience at the checkout, delivering a better experience on both sides of the counter. TruAge uses encrypted, one-time-use digital tokens to share only the most important elements to confirm the purchaser is of legal age—the driver’s license number, issuing state, expiration date and date of birth—which also minimizes human error from manual checks, protects the user’s privacy and makes identity theft difficult.

TruAge has built-in prompts for regulatory or manufacturer requirements to assist frontline staff in age-verification and meets manufacturer volume limits and enhanced access controls to ensure compliance with evolving regulations and eliminate liabilities linked to underage sales. It also provides admissible proof-of-age verification appended to retailers’ transaction logs that can be unlocked under subpoena and submitted as evidence.

In addition, TruAge tokens can be embedded into retailer loyalty apps to enable a single scan for age verification and loyalty, as well as providing and maintaining flags for verified age 21+ accounts for promotional ads and offers. The age-verification program is free to convenience retailers, consumers and point-of-sale (POS) providers to ensure accessibility and support the program’s wide adoption. TruAge is also available to other channels such as entertainment, sports and hospitality, mass retailers, e-commerce and delivery services.

“TruAge is redefining how we manage age-restricted sales. It’s not just a smarter solution, it’s a more responsible solution. It blends compliance with convenience, speeding up checkouts while reducing business risk. A TruAge scan is fast—it takes less than one second to complete compared to the seven to 40 seconds of traditional carding procedures—and it is safer and more secure because it only examines four of the more than 30 pieces of data on a physical driver’s license to ensure customer privacy,” said Stephanie Sikorski, CEO of TruAge. “TruAge also can more easily root out the increasingly sophisticated fake IDs that can be acquired online—helping manufacturers and retailers around the country shut down sales to minors. In short, it enhances regulatory compliance, reduces fraud and elevates the consumer experience—both in stores and online.”

“The Verifiable Credentials and Data Integrity specifications are key privacy-preserving technologies in our digital credential issuing, wallet and verifying product lines. We have already deployed these technologies into production environments, in governments and private industry, and the incorporation of new, responsible solutions like TruAge have the potential to positively impact tens of millions of individuals. We applaud W3C for investing in these technologies and look forward to continued work in the space as the market matures,” said Manu Sporny, CEO of Digital Bazaar.

“The (W3C’s) Verifiable Credential Working Group has done a great job producing this latest set of WC3 Recommendations,” said Brent Zundel, co-chair of the Verifiable Credentials Working Group. “Verifiable credentials are poised to make a significant impact on the way people and systems share data.”