Hello and welcome to another episode of GDPR Now, our podcast dedicated to all things related to data privacy and data security with all sorts of technology in between.

Your host today is me, Karen Heaton, owner of Data Protection for Business, recording from my home office in southwest London.

So in this episode,

we're going to talk about the age check certification scheme. Now, this is a scheme that's recently been approved by the ICO, and it's a first. And so today I'm absolutely delighted

to introduce Tony Allen, who is the CEO of the Age Check Certification Scheme, who was obviously

involved in bringing this to approval status with the ICO. So Tony has over 25 years of

experience of working in trading standards. He was a chartered trading standards practitioner,

a term I hadn't heard until about 20 minutes ago.

He was also the chair of the Government Expert Panel on Age Restrictions.

And to top it off, Tony wrote a book on the Law of Age Restricted Sales in England and Wales.

So I think we're in very safe hands today.

And Tony, thank you for joining us.

Hello, Karen. Thank you for having me along. Okay. So would you like to tell us about your business

and the work that you've done to get this age check certification scheme approved with the ICO?

Yeah, sure. So I, as councillors, I'm the chief executive of the age check certification scheme.

We're an independent third party accredited certification scheme.

Our role is to test the identity and age check systems work.

We are not a provider of any age check systems.

We don't provide age verification. We don't

provide any of the services. Our role is to independently test and check that they work. And

what we've been doing over the course of the last, almost 18 months now, working with the

Information Commission's office is on putting that through the requirements in GDPR for certification schemes.

...