Our approach to age verification

dogAdvisor Max is built for adult dog owners. The guidance Max provides on health, behaviour, nutrition, emergencies, and the deeply emotional moments that come with caring for a pet, is designed to be received and acted upon by adults capable of exercising their own judgement. We are clear that dogAdvisor is not intended for children, and our Terms of Service are unambiguous on that point.

We take this principle incredibly seriously. Where Max identifies that a user appears to be under 16, or where a user tells Max their age is under 16, Max will gently but consistently redirect them to a parent or guardian. This position holds throughout the conversation. Max will not waver, will not be talked out of it, and will not provide substantive guidance to someone who has identified themselves as a minor. We believe that a child asking about their dog deserves support, but that this support should always flow through a trusted adult.

As we built this approach, we were faced with a question we could not ignore: should dogAdvisor introduce mandatory, identity-based age verification: the kind that requires a user to submit a passport, driving licence, or other government-issued ID before accessing Max? We considered it carefully. And we decided, clearly and on principle, that the answer is no.

We believe the right to privacy when interacting with intelligence is fundamental, inalienable, and deserves to be protected to the fullest extent permissible by law.

We ask dog owners to trust Max with sensitive conversations about their pets' health, about difficult moments in their lives, sometimes about deeply personal things. That trust is only possible in an environment where people feel safe. Mandatory identity verification does not create safety. For many users, it creates the opposite: a barrier, a surveillance mechanism, a reason not to engage honestly. We believe everyone deserves free access to our technology without ever being forced into disclosing who they are.

In cases when users attempt to get Max to engage with content that clearly violates our policies and where Max has warned them multiple times and since deployed Safety Stops, Max uses a multitude of signals and methods to identify you across different devices, browsers, internet protocols, and even locations. For obvious reasons we do not disclose the specific signals Max uses to evaluate conduct as this would make such breaches easier to conduct. What we can say is that Max's judgement is contextual, graduated, and never arbitrary. Max has absolutely no tendencies to discriminate against owners or animals and takes action solely on whether the owner's conduct falls in line with our Usage Policies.

We recognise that our decision on age verification is not made in a vacuum. The UK's Online Safety Act represents one of the most significant shifts in digital regulation in a generation, placing new obligations on platforms to protect younger users. Similar legislation is advancing across the EU, the United States, Australia, and beyond. The direction of travel is clear. We respect the intent behind this legislation. Protecting children online is a genuinely important goal, and we do not dismiss the concerns that have driven these regulatory changes. But we also believe that the methods matter and that the way we protect young people should not come at the cost of the privacy of everyone else.

Ultimately, responsibility does not sit with us alone. As with any digital service, users of dogAdvisor Max are bound by our Terms of Service. The use of Max by those under 16 is strictly prohibited. We enforce this through Max's own intelligence and conduct, and through the expectation that adults using our platform will act accordingly. We are a platform built on trust. We extend that trust to our users, and we ask them to extend it in return.

We will continue to monitor developments closely. We will engage with relevant regulatory bodies as and when appropriate. If the legal landscape in any jurisdiction requires us to act differently, we will do so, and we will be transparent with our community about what that means and why. This is not the last word on age verification at dogAdvisor. We will keep reviewing our approach. We will keep asking the difficult questions. We will keep being honest with our community about where we stand and why, even when that position is not the easiest one to hold.

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