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The 20 terms that decide what a comparison is measuring

A comparison is only as good as its definitions. A component is not a system, an age range is not a binary threshold, and a challenge age is not the legal age. These are the terms from the published framework that a comparison has to use, with a note on the difference each one makes.

Terms relating to age assurance

Ref	Term	Our statement
3.1	age assurance	The process of establishing, determining or confirming an attribute that expresses a person's age.
3.2	age assurance practice statement	A written account of the procedures and operational practices an organisation uses when it provides an age assurance service.
3.3	age assurance service provider	An organisation responsible for the processes that establish or compute age attributes.
3.4	age assurance service	A service delivered by one provider or by several acting together.
3.5	age assurance attribute	An attribute that indicates a person is a certain age, is over or under an age, or falls inside an age range.
3.6	age estimation	An age assurance attribute produced from features or behaviour inherent in a person.
3.7	age-related eligibility	A right to reach goods, content or services that turns on an age limit or band.
3.8	age verification	An age assurance attribute obtained by computing the difference between the current date and a person's date of birth.
3.9	age inference	An age assurance attribute derived from information that indirectly implies a person is over or under an age.
3.10	indicators of confidence	A quantitative, qualitative or descriptive measure of how correctly and accurately an age assurance attribute can be said to relate to a person.
3.11	binding	The property that ties an age attribute to the correct person.
3.12	contra-indicator	Evidence that calls into question whether an age assurance attribute is correct.
3.13	presentation attack	An attempt to deceive a biometric capture process by presenting something other than the live person it is meant to measure.
3.14	presentation attack detection	The methods used to decide whether a biometric sample comes from a live person present at the point of capture.

Terms relating to analysis

Ref	Term	Our statement
3.15	age check practice statement	The provider's published account of the outcomes, components, confidence indicators and controls it uses to deliver an age check.
3.16	benchmark	A reference point against which the performance of a system or component is measured.
3.17	object of interest	The thing whose characteristics are being compared in a benchmarking exercise.
3.18	balanced accuracy	The mean of the true positive rate and the true negative rate for a binary decision.
3.19	challenge age	The age a system uses as its decision point when it is set above the legal threshold to create a safety margin.
3.20	test crew	The group of people who provide test samples for a benchmarking exercise.