Lying about your age has been a part of growing up for a long time. Teenagers are famously skilled at slipping past bouncers or pasting together fake IDs to get into clubs or buy booze. The internet makes it even easier. Any 12-year-old with basic math skills can set up a social media account or watch some porn simply by selecting the right year in a drop-down menu. You don’t even need to lie to an actual person.

In recent years, governments and tech companies alike have begun looking to artificial intelligence for better solutions than those the average web platforms now employ, which amounts to little more than a mechanical honor system. Two leaders in the nascent age verification industry, FaceTec and Yoti, say their tools offer more assurance than filling in a form with an easily-spoofable date of birth and are more secure than offline ID checks. Just look into your device’s camera and let the program “read” your face. Then, poof! The AI will decide how old you are.

“It's even more privacy preserving than me, in a bar, asking to see your ID,” said Julia Dawson, the chief policy and regulatory officer at Yoti, which claims to have conducted more than 570 million age checks for its clients. “It's more privacy preserving than me asking you to upload something because nothing is retained.”

Yoti’s biggest-name client is none other than Instagram, where it performs age verification checks to ensure that users are 13 or older. In a description of the “facial age estimation technology” it supplies for Instagram, the company explains that users’ facial images are “used for the purpose of estimating age. Once a result is given, the image is instantly deleted.”