The way we prove our identity is broken. Outdated processes and documents, created long before the digital era, make proving who we are to businesses and other people challenging. Yoti wants to change that. We are focused on making it faster, easier and safer for anyone to prove their identity using their phone.
Unfortunately, these challenges are amplified for transgender, non-binary and gender variant communities. We want to do what we can to help fix that. That’s why we’re partnering with national transgender charity, Sparkle, who work hard to build a more inclusive future.
Who is Sparkle?
Sparkle promotes positive representation, awareness and acceptance of the transgender, non-binary, gender fluid and intersex community. They organise events and provide advice, training and support to businesses, individuals, non-profit organisations and the public sector.
Every year, Sparkle host and run the Sparkle Weekend, the world’s largest free-to-attend celebration of gender diversity. Held in Sackville Gardens, in the heart of Manchester’s Gay Village, this year’s celebrations will be held from Friday 12th July to Sunday 14th July – and we’ll be there.
Identifying and addressing transgender challenges
We’re excited to be working with Sparkle. We’ll be researching the identity issues that are affecting the transgender community and working to try overcome these challenges.
Yoti will be representing at Sparkle Weekend in the Self-Care Zone, promoting the Yoti app as a method of identification to Sparkle Ball ticket holders and Sparkle Weekend pageant contestants. We’ll be demonstrating how our tech can help people represent their true selves and researching how our age estimation technology works with a diverse audience.
Real identities that you control
On our mission to become the world’s trusted identity platform, we want to put individuals in control and help everyone present their real identity.
Our app already solves some of the issues seen with a traditional ID document. We let you upload a current photo so your ID is always up to date with who you are and how you want to be seen. With the Yoti app, you’re in control to share only the details you want and nothing more.
But we know there’s a long way to go and we want to explore how we can help solve these problems, like how some IDs require a specified gender (typically male or female) which doesn’t work for everyone.
AI for good
The Yoti app helps people prove their identity and verify their age. Our new age estimation technology, Yoti Age Scan, uses artificial intelligence to anonymously compare your face to thousands of age verified faces and estimate your age.
This can be used to access age-restricted goods, services and content online as well as in person, waving goodbye to “waiting for assistance” at the self-checkout and more.
We are working hard to ensure it works fairly for everyone, no matter who they are. Look out for us at the Sparkle Weekender to give Yoti a try and hear more.
Yoti has signed the Safe Face Pledge to ensure we remain true to our core principles. It will keep us actively focused on offering a safe and secure way to prove identity, ensuring we continue to keep our core principles in mind with everything we do:
- Always act in the interest of our users
- Encourage personal data ownership
- Enable privacy and anonymity
- Keep sensitive data secure
- Keep our community safe
- Be transparent and accountable
- Make Yoti available to anyone
While this is the start of our journey, we look forward to seeing our partnership with Sparkle and their community grow.
For more information about Sparkle and their inspiring work, please visit: https://www.sparkle.org.uk