From Deep-Tech PhD to Age Intelligence
I spent the best part of a decade working in cybersecurity. I built security teams from scratch, held CISO-level roles, and spent my career helping organisations understand that their biggest vulnerabilities were human, not technical. Culture is the firewall you cannot buy. That belief shaped everything I did.
Then I had children. And the internet looked very different from the other side.
As a cybersecurity professional, I understood the architecture. I knew how platforms collected data, how algorithms surfaced content, how identity systems worked. What I had not fully appreciated until I became a parent was how profoundly the internet was not designed with children in mind. Not as an oversight. Structurally. The business models, the engagement mechanics, the data collection practices. None of it accounts for the fact that a significant portion of users are children who should not be seeing what they are seeing.
The age checks that existed were either trivially easy to bypass or required handing over identity documents and facial scans, which created entirely new privacy risks. As someone who had spent years telling boards that data minimisation was a security principle, not just a compliance box to tick, the irony was not lost on me.
So I went back to university. I started a PhD at the University of Strathclyde, focused on one question: is it possible to determine someone’s age online without knowing who they are?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. And that is what Neon Guard is.
What Neon Guard actually does
Neon Guard is a privacy-native age intelligence platform. It determines whether a user is an adult or a child through a lightweight, anonymous session. No ID is uploaded. No facial scan is taken. No personal data is collected or stored.
The technology works by analysing behavioural and cognitive signals during a brief interaction. Think of it less like a passport check and more like a CAPTCHA, but for age. The session is quick, non-invasive, and designed to be as low-friction as possible for the user.
At its core, the system has two layers. The first is an anonymous age gate that provides a binary classification: adult or child. Our current proof-of-concept delivers a competitive accuracy rate on this classification, built on patent-pending technology developed through five years of PhD research with ethics-approved methodology.
The second layer is what we call Age Drift Monitoring. This is the part that makes Neon Guard fundamentally different from every other approach on the market. Instead of checking age once and assuming it stays true forever, Age Drift Monitoring continuously assesses anonymous signals over time. If the behavioural pattern on a device shifts in ways that suggest the user may no longer be the person who originally passed the age check, the system’s confidence adjusts accordingly.
No other age assurance provider offers this. Every existing solution is a one-time gate. Neon Guard is the continuous layer that sits behind it.
Why privacy is not a feature, it is the architecture
There is an important distinction between building privacy into a product and bolting it on after the fact. Most age assurance providers collect personal data and then promise to handle it responsibly. We only collect anonymous signals.
This is not a marketing position. It is an architectural decision. The system was designed from day one to work without identity. There is no database of faces. There is no vault of passports. There is no personal data to breach, because we don’t collect identity information in the first place.
In cybersecurity, we talk about reducing the attack surface. Neon Guard as a company is designed to have a minimal attack surface from the start. That is not a clever workaround. It is the whole point.
For platforms, this means integrating age assurance without taking on the liability of storing biometric or identity data. For users, it means proving your age without proving who you are. For parents, it means a system that protects your child’s privacy rather than trading it for safety.
Age known. Identity never revealed. That is not a tagline. It is the engineering principle the entire platform is built on.
Who Neon Guard is for
I built Neon Guard for platforms that need to comply with age assurance regulation but do not want to create new privacy risks in the process. That includes social media platforms, content providers, gaming companies, AdTech platforms, and any digital service where knowing a user’s age matters but knowing their identity should not.
The regulatory pressure is real and growing. The UK Online Safety Act, the EU Digital Services Act, Australian minimum age laws, and a wave of US state-level legislation are all mandating age assurance with substantial penalties for non-compliance. Platforms need solutions. We are the next generation of dynamic and continuous age intelligence.
Neon Guard solves the same problem without those trade-offs. Lower friction. Anonymous. Continuous confidence rather than a single check.
Where we are now
Neon Guard will soon start private testing, with active conversations underway with some of the largest platforms in the world. The technology is patent pending. The IP is fully owned by the company. And we are raising pre-seed investment to fund product development, initial partnerships, and our go-to-market strategy.
I am building Neon Guard because I believe children deserve better protection online, and I believe that protection should not come at the cost of everyone’s privacy. Those two things are not in conflict. They only appear to be if you accept the assumption that you need to know who someone is to know how old they are.
I do not accept that assumption. And I have built the technology to prove it.
If you’d like to get in touch, connect with me on LinkedIn or email Neon Guard.
