Age assurance

An illustration of a face being marked as "over 18". The accompanying text says "Exploring social purpose: Age assurance".

Addressing social challenges: How age assurance can help solve everyday problems

Everything we do at Yoti is with our social purpose in mind. From developing our products to driving regulatory change, we’re always thinking about the challenges we can help solve. This series looks at how our products could meaningfully benefit individual people and wider society. This article focuses on our age assurance solutions, which include facial age estimation, reusable Digital IDs and age verification with a document.   Ensure children only access age-appropriate content online It is becoming increasingly easy for young people to access the internet. Therefore it’s vital that young people can only access age-appropriate content. Unfortunately, many

8 min read
Preview image of Yoti's Facial Age Estimation fact sheet which will help users learn more about what facial age estimation does and does not do

Facial age estimation: the facts

We developed facial age estimation to give everyone a secure and private way to prove their age, without sharing their name or any identity documents. We also wanted to address the inclusion issue, given not everyone has an ID – which can exclude them from accessing age-restricted goods, services and experiences.  The technology can determine a person’s age from a facial image. We believe this is a better way to check someone’s age. People shouldn’t have to share their whole identity just to prove their age.  We work hard to explain facial age estimation and how it works. Unfortunately, some

1 min read
An image of a young person wearing a set of headphones and using their smartphone

Online Safety Act becomes law

After years of debate and discussion, the Online Safety Act is now law – marking a new chapter in online safety. There are three key elements within the Online Safety Act that we are ready to help with: Age assurance to help platforms create safe, age-appropriate experiences online User verification to give users more control over who they interact with online Over 18 consent from content creators for the publication of intimate images   Age assurance in the Online Safety Act The Online Safety Act is not about excluding children from the internet. It’s about giving them an experience

5 min read
Facial age estimation, reusable digital ID and Age verification with a document are all methods of age assurance

Offering choice in age assurance methods

New regulations are being introduced that require platforms to create age-appropriate experiences. These include the UK’s Online Safety Bill, the EU’s Better Internet for Kids strategy and country-specific Children’s Codes. These regulations aim to help young people thrive online by ensuring they are only exposed to age-appropriate content. It ensures that only adults can access certain goods, services and experiences or enter legal contracts. It also means that adults are kept out of spaces designed exclusively for children. To do this, platforms need to check the ages of their users so that they can design their sites accordingly.   How

7 min read
An image of a person entering their credit card details into a laptop

Exploring bias in credit card-based age verification

We publish the accuracy rates of our facial age estimation technology, split by gender, age and skin tone. By being open and transparent, we hope to give businesses and users confidence in the technology. We also hope this helps regulators to fairly review facial age estimation as an effective age assurance method. However whilst evaluating facial age estimation, some stakeholders and regulators overlook the drawbacks and bias shown in other age assurance approaches.   Bias and limitations of using credit cards for age verification One age check method approved in many countries is asking adults to use a credit card

7 min read
An image of a person's smartphone. The person is using Yoti's facial age estimation technology. Next to this image, the text reads: "externally audited, over 600 million age checks, used by leading brands". Underneath this list are the logos of Instagram, Aldi, SuperAwesome and Only Fans.

Age assurance: What makes for the maturity of a technology or an industry?

Last week, the Australian government decided against the eSafety Commissioner’s recommendation of a pilot before requiring adult sites to verify the ages of visitors. They said this was due to concerns about the privacy of people’s data and the maturity of age assurance technology. So what exactly would constitute a mature technology? Is it something comparable to NASA’s Technology Readiness level? This suggests the technology needs to have gone through a thorough process of research and prototyping, before testing in a live environment and then ultimately rolling it out. If that’s the case, we can say that Yoti and other

7 min read