In this blog series, our CEO Robin Tombs will be sharing his experience, whilst focusing on major themes, news and issues in the world of identity verification and age assurance.
This month, Robin talks about Digital ID app downloads, Yoti becoming an Orchestration Service Provider and NIST ranking our latest facial age estimation model in first place for 13-16 year olds.
Insights into Digital ID use following the Online Safety Act
From Friday 25th July, the UK’s Online Safety Act required many businesses across the porn, social media, livestreaming, dating and some gaming sectors to perform age checks.
Yoti’s privacy-by-design principles, data minimisation and technical architecture mean we know very little about the millions of individuals who use our services to get their age checked. Our model for the most popular method, facial age estimation, has not been trained to understand gender, skin colour or match faces to other faces.
Hundreds of millions of people have completed over 900 million Yoti facial age estimation checks since late 2018. We don’t know what percentage are male, female, lighter-skinned or darker-skinned. All of these faces have been deleted instantly after the age estimation is performed.
The 8.5-year-old free Yoti Digital ID app is super private and super secure. We can report the percentage of identity documents added by country, birth year and sex/gender.
Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, daily Yoti UK downloads have soared well over tenfold compared to June’s daily downloads. By mid-July, we surpassed 6 million UK downloads.
91% of UK identity documents were added by males. The app was downloaded by men across all age groups, with 68% of males adding identity documents being over 30 years old.
More males aged over 50 downloaded the Yoti Digital ID app last week than those aged between 18 and 24. However, it’s worth remembering that many younger UK adult men (and women) already had the Yoti Digital ID app before this date.
A bit more on Yoti Digital ID wallet privacy:
When individuals create their Yoti account, we don’t know who each person is. When they use their Yoti app to share age or identity details with organisations or other individuals, we still don’t know who they are.
The only time a Yoti team member may briefly see limited details is when some users add an identity document to their Yoti app. In some cases, we sometimes need a randomly selected security expert to review the security features of that identity document in 1 of our 2 Security Centres. These secure rooms are accessible only by biometric fingerprint.
In these 2 rooms, there are no pens, paper, phones, tablets or laptops. There are just experts present to review identity document security features and correct any data which may be incorrectly extracted automatically from the identity document by the technology.
Yoti becomes a certified OSP, simplifying digital ID checks for all
Following a rigorous audit by Kantara Initiative, Yoti is now a certified Orchestration Service Provider (OSP) under the UK’s Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF).
OSPs will play a crucial role in the UK digital identity market. They’ll enable millions of individuals to easily prove their identity, age and other attributes to tens of thousands of UK and global businesses which are operating in both regulated (and non regulated) UK markets.
Yoti can now:
- offer a single integration for businesses wanting to accept a variety of DIATF-certified reusable digital IDs. This removes the complexity of individually connecting with multiple identity providers.
- verify GOV.UK credentials, including identity details from mobile driving licences (mDLs), once available.
- continue verifying (to DIATF-certified levels of assurance) individuals who prefer not to use reusable digital IDs. Instead, they can complete an identity document scan, live selfie capture and face match at each business regulated to complete DIATF levels of identity assurance.
A healthy, competitive market of DIATF-certified Identity Service Providers (IDSPs), Attribute Service Providers (ASPs), Holder Service Providers (HSPs) and Orchestration Service Providers (OSPs) will transform how UK customers prove their identity online.
Businesses will want OSPs to be able to check all the popular certified reusable digital IDs used by their UK customers. Providers of reusable digital IDs wallets will need to be integrated with all the popular OSPs. This will ensure their ID wallet owners can prove their age or identity as widely as possible.
By the end of 2026, I think at least 20 million UK residents over the age of 16 will hold at least one (or probably 2) certified reusable digital IDs wallets.
Millions will get the UK Government ID wallet. This will include most of the roughly 5 million genuine UK directors currently registered (or in future registering) with Companies House.
Many of these UK Government ID wallet owners will also get a digital ID wallet from providers. Likely providers include Google, Apple, Yoti, Post Office EasyID and Luciditi. These will be used to prove their age online and at supermarket self-checkouts, and to prove their identity for right to work, right to rent, right to study, DBS checks and a growing number of other sector-specific identity checks.
There’ll be many others who follow the millions of Yoti users. These users, over the past 8 years, have added their NFC chip-read passports into their Yoti Digital ID wallets, without needing to download a UK Government ID wallet.
For identity providers like Yoti, who have historically supported businesses with identity verification (where individuals have had to repeat the process for each business), the rapid adoption of certified reusable digital IDs will disrupt the UK identity market.
A big UK reusable digital ID market will also offer much room for innovation, improved customer experiences, higher and wider trust, reduced fraud and streamlined business processes.
Yoti’s latest facial age estimation model ranked #1 for 13-16 year olds
I’m delighted that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has ranked Yoti’s latest facial age estimation model, yoti-003 (our June 2025 model), in first place for the accurate estimation of 13-16 year olds.
Since late 2018, we’ve been helping a growing number of the world’s most high profile social media, gaming, dating, livestreaming and porn brands to check the age (usually over 18, but also over 16 or over 13) of hundreds of millions of their users.
Most of these businesses have been primarily concerned about our accuracy for 15-17 year olds, in order to prevent those aged under 18 from being incorrectly classified as over 18. However, over the last 2 years, more of the big brands are keen to see high accuracy rates for over 13 checks (and for over 16 checks too, especially with Australia’s over 16 age requirement for social media).
NIST publishes our mean absolute error for those aged between 13 and 16 as 2.06 years, significantly ahead of most other vendors. The 10th best vendor has a mean absolute error of 3.86 years. However, our customers know that our model is trained on mobile phone facial images. Our testing of those aged between 13 and 16 shows a mean absolute error of 1.21 years.
It’s important to note that NIST uses images of children captured in Mexico at United States consular facilities – and obviously, Yoti’s models are not optimised for Mexican children or indeed any single country’s children or adults.
For our September 2024 model, which was independently tested in November 2024 by the Age Check Certification Scheme (using mobile phone-captured facial images), the mean absolute error for 18 year olds was 1.2 years – whereas NIST measured it as 2.6 years.
Our mean absolute error for those aged between 10 and 18 is 1.16 years for our June 2025 model. That’s down from 1.21 years for our September 2024 model which itself was down from 1.34 years for the September 2023 model.
Digital ID wallet downloads skyrocket in a month
On 15th August, over 50,000 individuals downloaded the Yoti Digital ID wallet. Most of the downloaders were British or French – 6 times the number of UK and French downloads compared to 15th July, a month ago.
By design, we don’t know who these individuals are.
Each individual is the only person who holds their personal master encryption key on their phone. This key controls when a person wants to share one or more of their encrypted credentials with an organisation or another person.
We only know that an unknown person has shared, for example, their verified name or their verified ‘over 18’ status with an organisation. This allows us to bill an organisation for the ID share. Our privacy-preserving business model doesn’t require us to know who uses the Yoti app.
We know that some British users went on to share their identity details for certified right to work, right to rent, DBS (criminal record) checks, child trust fund identity checks or other identity and age checks.
Other British users (and even more French users, where we don’t do as many ID shares) shared an ‘over 18’ credential to access online porn.
We think that as more porn operators accept Yoti Digital ID, more adults will choose to get the Yoti app. This then means they’ll no longer need to remember usernames and passwords on sites that simply need to know that visitors are over 18.
These sites and businesses are happy that Yoti provides these ‘over 18’ Yoti Digital ID shares free of charge.
Later, these adults will be able to choose to share their age and identity with many more organisations as reusable digital ID becomes mainstream.
A much larger wave of Brits are likely to get the Yoti app when the UK Government changes the alcohol laws in December 2025. This change will enable up to 56 million adults to begin using certified digital ID to prove age at up to approximately 200,000 licensed premises, including supermarket self-checkouts, from 2026 onwards.
