Windows is about to start telling apps roughly how old you are

Microsoft has published developer documentation for something it calls age signals, and it's worth understanding before it shows up. Two new Windows APIs, GetUserAgeRangeAsync and GetAgeVerificationStatusAsync, let an app ask Windows how old the signed-in user is. The answer comes back as a band rather than a date: under 10, 10 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 and over. The second one replies Verified, Unverified, OptedOut, or one of two variants of "can't say right now".

Microsoft's phrasing is that the APIs "provide a privacy-preserving mechanism", and the design does back that up. The documentation is blunt that no personal data is exposed: not your age, not your date of birth, not family relationships. An app can't ask anonymously either, since the Digital Safety platform checks the caller's identity first and anything unregistered gets nothing useful back.

The timing is regulatory. Ofcom, enforcing the UK's Online Safety Act, requires "highly effective" age assurance, the European Commission is pushing privacy-preserving proof of age, and California's Digital Age Assurance Act, passed in August 2026, obliges the operating system itself to supply an age signal. Microsoft's answer is to hold that fact once, in Windows, instead of letting every game and social app collect birthdays it has no business storing.

Two practical notes. The APIs are documented but switched off, and Microsoft says they will be "turned on in a future release later this year", so today they return nothing at all. And they only work in a session with a Microsoft account signed in, which nudges local-account holdouts in a direction they have been resisting for years. Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check shows which accounts are actually signed in on your PC and what they are tied to, which is a fair thing to look over before Windows starts answering questions on your behalf.