Does Your Gardening Implement Company Require Age Assurance?

Age assurance shows that a customer meets the minimum age for buying a product or service.

I thought I knew every possible use case for age assurance—smoking tobacco or marijuana, buying firearms, driving a car, drinking alcohol, gambling, viewing adult content, or using social media.

But after investigating a product featured in Cultivated Cool, I realized that I had missed one use case. Turns out that there’s another type of company that needs age assurance…and a way to explain the age assurance method the company adopts.

Off on a tangent: what is Cultivated Cool?

Psst…don’t tell anyone what you’re about to read.

The so-called experts say that a piece of content should only have one topic and one call to action. Well, it’s Sunday so hopefully the so-called experts are taking a break and will never see the paragraphs below.

This is my endorsement for Cultivated Cool. Its URL is https://cultivated.cool/, which I hope you can remember.

Cultivated Cool self-identifies as “(y)our weekly guide to the newest, coolest products you didn’t know you needed.” Concentrating on the direct-to-consumer (DTC or D2C) space, Cultivated Cool works with companies to “transform (their) email marketing from a chore into a revenue generator.” And to prove the effectiveness of email, it offers its own weekly email that highlights various eye-catching products. But not trendy ones:

Trends come and go but cool never goes out of style.

From https://cultivated.cool/.

Bredemarket isn’t a prospect for Cultivated Cool’s first service—my written content creation is not continuously cool. (Although it’s definitely not trendy either). But I am a consumer of Cultivated Cool’s weekly emails, and you should subscribe to its weekly emails also. Enter your email and click the “Subscribe” button on Cultivated Cool’s webpage.

And Cultivated Cool’s weekly emails lead me to the point of this post.

The day that Stella sculpted air

Today’s weekly newsletter issue from Cultivated Cool is entitled “Dig It.” But this has nothing to do with the Beatles or with Abba. Instead it has to do with gardening, and the issue tells the story of Stella, in five parts. The first part is entitled “Snip it in the Bud,” and begins as follows.

Stella felt a shiver go down her spine the first time the pruner blades closed. She wasn’t just cutting branches; she was sculpting air.

From https://cultivated.cool/dig-it/.

The pruner blades featured in Cultivated Cool are sold by Niwaki, an English company that offers Japanese-inspired products. As I type this, Niwaki offers 18 different types of secateurs (pruning shears), including large hand, small hand, right-handed, and left-handed varieties. You won’t get these at your dollar store; prices (excluding VAT) range from US$45.50 to US$280.50 (Tobisho Hiryu Secateurs).

Stella, how old are you?

But regardless of price, all the secateurs sold by Niwaki have one thing in common: an age restriction on purchases. Not that Niwaki truly enforces this restriction.

Please note: By law, we are not permitted to sell a knife or blade to any person under the age of 18. By placing an order for one of these items you are declaring that you are 18 years of age or over. These items must be used responsibly and appropriately.

From https://www.niwaki.com/tobisho-hiryu-secateurs/#P00313-1.

That’s the functional equivalent of the so-called age verification scheme used on some alcohol websites.

I hope you’re sitting down as I reveal this to you: underage people can bypass the age assurance scheme on alcohol websites by inputting any year of birth that they wish. Just like anyone, even a small child, can make any declaration of age that they want, as long as their credit card is valid.

Now I have no idea whether Ofcom’s UK Online Safety Act consultations will eventually govern Niwaki’s sales of adult-controlled physical products. But if Niwaki finds itself under the UK Online Safety Act, or some other act in the United Kingdom or any country where Niwaki conducts business, then a simple assurance that the purchaser is old enough to buy “a knife or blade” will not be sufficient.

Niwaki’s website would then need to adopt some form of age assurance for purchasers, either by using a government-issued identification document (age verification) or examining the face to algorithmically surmise the customer’s age (age estimation).

• Age verification. For example, the purchaser would need to provide their government-issued identity document so that the seller can verify the purchaser’s age. Ideally, this would be coupled with live face capture so that the seller can compare the live face to the face on the ID, ensuring that a kid didn’t steal mommy’s or daddy’s driver’s license (licence) or passport.
• Age estimation. For example, the purchaser would need to provide their live face so that the seller can estimate the purchaser’s age. In this case (and in the age verification case if a live face is captured), the seller would need to use liveness dectection to ensure that the face is truly a live face and is not a presentation attack or other deepfake.

And then the seller would need to explain why it was doing all of this.

How can a company explain its age assurance solution in a way that its prospects will understand…and how can the company reassure its prospects that its age assurance method protects their privacy?

Companies other than identity companies must explain their identity solutions

Which brings me to the TRUE call to action in this post. (Sorry Mark and Lindsey. You’re still cool.)

I’ve stated ad nauseum that identity companies need to explain their identity solutions: why they developed them, how they work, what they do, and several other things.

In the same way, firms that incorporate solutions from identity companies got some splainin’ to do.

This applies to a financial institution that requires customers to use an identity verification solution before opening an account, just like it applies to an online gardening implement website that uses an age assurance method to check the age of pruning shear purchasers.

So how can such companies explain their identity and biometrics features in a way their end customers can understand?

Bredemarket can help.