Google Wallet's latest feature will have a huge impact on all users

Summary

Google Wallet is getting a new feature soon that will let users verify their age. This will be huge for those who value their privacy. Over the past year or so, age verification has become increasingly common across online platforms and through several apps. However, verifying your age has for the most part required uploading a picture of your ID. Many people have not been fond of this requirement, citing privacy concerns. With the Google Wallet verification, users would be able to bypass the ID uploads.

Google Wallet is going to be getting a new age verification feature for users. While the feature is not yet live, it appears that Google is currently working on it and will be rolling it out in a future update. In addition to this new feature, Google is also testing an updates menu in the app. These follow recent feature additions like the delivery dashboard for package tracking, the ability to add digital IDs in Europe, and live flight tracking.

The updates section is said to be for listing details about transactions that were extracted from their linked Gmail account. For example, say you use Google Wallet to make a payment for something at the grocery store. You would end up getting an email for that transaction. The updates section in the app could list that and other transactions as receipts that were extracted from those emails, giving users a central place to see all those in one convenient spot.

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in the past 6 months or so, then you’ve no doubt seen all of the different apps and services that are starting to require age verification to use the service or some of its features. Discord, for example, announced age verification was coming, and users have not been happy about it. Particularly because of the security concerns surrounding Discord due to breaches, as well as its ties to certain companies who would be handling that data.

Naturally, users weren’t keen on uploading pictures of themselves and handing that data off to unknown entities. But, age verification is being set as a requirement. So Google’s way of helping users feel more at ease will be with this age verification process in Google Wallet.

As showcased by Android Authority, the verification would let users verify their age without sharing personal information. This would likely include IDs. So, you could, in theory, end up being able to verify your age with services without having to share your picture. It isn’t clear what services this will be compatible with.

Google Wallet age verification will let you verify without sharing personal information