Age checks
Articles
Jan 20, 2025
Yoti responds to Ofcom’s final guidance on highly effective age assurance for Part 5 pornography providers
Ofcom has published the final guidance on highly effective age assurance for (Part 5) providers of pornography, under the Online Safety Act. There are a lot of good principles and effective guidance to ensure children are protected online and there is a clear deadline of July 2025 for all sites (be that pornography sites or social media platforms which allow pornography) to have age verification in place to prevent children from accessing adult content. We are pleased to see that Ofcom has listed several popular age assurance methods, such as facial age estimation, Digital ID wallets, and document verification,
Articles
Oct 18, 2024
French regulator Arcom introduces age checks for online adult content
In October 2024, Arcom, the French regulator responsible for online porn, announced that adult operators and platforms with pornographic content need to introduce age checks, ensuring only adults can access the content. These rules are effective from 11th January 2025. There will be a three month transitional period, where temporary methods like bank card verification can be used as a preliminary age filter, but they must include strong authentication to ensure that the user is the cardholder. After the transitional period ends on 11 April 2025, adult site operators will need to have taken the following steps: Age checks
Articles
Oct 17, 2024
Understanding age assurance in the Online Safety Act
The Online Safety Act 2023 is a piece of UK legislation that aims to protect children and adults online. It covers a wide range of issues including minimising the risk of children seeing harmful and age-inappropriate content, removing illegal content like child sexual abuse material (CSAM), criminalising fraudulent and scam ads, and introducing age verification for certain online services. This blog looks at some of the age requirements in the Online Safety Act and what this means for tech companies, adult sites, gaming companies, social media platforms and dating sites. What is the purpose of the Online Safety
Articles
Oct 01, 2024
How accurate is facial age estimation?
“How accurate is it?” is the first question regulators, businesses and users tend to ask about facial age estimation. To date, we have mainly presented the technology’s Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as a proxy for accuracy. It’s an intuitive way to understand how accurate a model is. We can say it’s accurate to 1.3 MAE for those aged between 13 and 17 years or 2.5 MAE for those aged between 6 and 70 years. However, the answer is slightly more complicated. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many people will be more aware of the terms ‘true positive’ and ‘false negative’
Articles
Apr 09, 2024
US age verification laws for online platforms
From buying goods online to accessing crucial services, there are countless advantages to an increasingly digital world. But with this development comes the serious challenge of ensuring that users can safely navigate online environments. As young people are able to access the internet more easily than ever, it’s important to make sure that their online journeys are age-appropriate. According to a national survey, the average age at which children in the US first see pornography is 12, with 15% first seeing online pornography at age 10 or younger. In response to the evolving digital landscape, regulation is making strides
Articles
Mar 28, 2024
Our Fifth Regulatory Roundtable: exploring age assurance methods
As regulators and companies consider new laws to protect children and give them age-appropriate experiences online, they are faced with the challenge of how to determine someone’s age. We explored this topic at our latest regulatory roundtable; a lively and healthy discussion, chaired by our Guardian Gavin Starks. We discussed different age assurance methods, and the progress and widespread adoption of facial age estimation. We shared key updates on our technology, how facial age estimation can be configured to work with safety buffers, and demonstrated some live use cases. The roundtable also looked at why there needs to be