Age assurance
Articles
Sep 14, 2023
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
Articles
Aug 03, 2023
Effective facial age estimation: a privacy-preserving approach to age assurance
For platforms to deliver age-appropriate content, they need to know the age of their users. Age estimation technology can provide an inclusive and accessible solution. It’s possible to estimate a person’s age from a number of features, including their voice, face, palm or fingerprints. Some age estimation methods are very accurate. Others collect little or even no personal data. But very few can do both. When done to a high standard, effective facial age estimation can offer a high level of privacy and a high level of assurance. Age estimation in the real world Consider the following situation: a
Articles
Jul 11, 2023
Effective Age Verification: Going beyond reading a date of birth on an ID
Regulators around the world are recognising that more needs to be done to protect children from harmful content online. From the Age Appropriate Design Code and the Digital Services Act to the Online Safety Act and California Age Appropriate Design Code, businesses are being required to have age-appropriate controls in place. But to do this, they need to know the age of those accessing their services. After all, if they don’t know someone’s age, they can’t protect them. This raises some important questions. How should companies verify the ages of their users? How can they ensure age verification is
Articles
Jun 22, 2023
Free Digital ID age checks
This blog post was updated in March 2025 with new and updated regulations. It also clarifies that the Digital ID age checks are free to businesses, when they are used alongside other Yoti age verification solutions. ***** With so much of our lives spent online – we can chat to friends, watch our favourite shows, and expand our learning – it’s so important to make sure children are only accessing age-appropriate content. A wave of regulations around the world are aiming to create safer online environments. In the UK, the Age Appropriate Design Code (the ‘AADC’, also called the
Articles
Feb 24, 2023
Global retail report: Exploring how facial age estimation improves the self-checkout
Nearly four years ago we integrated our facial age estimation technology into retail self-checkouts. Since then, it has been trialled by retailers in the US and Estonia, with further pilots taking place in Germany, Poland and Czech Republic. And last year UK supermarkets – including Asda, Morrisons, Tesco and Co-op – tested the technology as part of a Home Office regulatory sandbox. The aim of the sandbox was to trial digital age verification for the sale of alcohol under the UK Licensing Act (2003). Detailed reports from the Home Office and the supermarkets who participated in the sandbox are due
Articles
Jan 17, 2023
On Facial Age Estimation, improvements and updates
We continue to invest in improving the accuracy of our world-leading facial age estimation and we will soon be releasing a new ‘Jan 2023’ model with improved accuracy across all skin tones and gender for those aged 6-70. At Yoti we constantly strive to improve all our services given our commitment to tech for good, and given the growing market importance of these services and increasing regulatory engagement. For example, coming soon we’ll be introducing multiple, concurrent age estimation models, which will help improve accuracy even further, whilst still completing a check within seconds. We will also continue to update
