Yoti face biometrics ready for businesses facing age verification laws, says CEO

Age estimation and face matching are hot products for digital identity and biometrics providers. Governments are cracking down on unrestricted porn sites, online alcohol sales, social media and other age-restricted activities. This week, Variety reported on adult content giant Pornhub blocking access to users in Texas over new age verification laws. As the saying goes, everything’s big in Texas – including a user base large enough to matter in a U.S. context, especially with several other states already on the block list.

London-based digital ID verification company Yoti is among the firms offering products and services for businesses that are suddenly facing new age restriction measures. Its Yoti MyFace Match technology provides 1:1 and 1:N face matching that can be used by social media platforms and porn sites to ensure minors do not have access to age restricted content.

Posting on Yoti’s blog, Matt Prendergast, the firm’s product marketing director, says that while previous R&D has mainly focused on age estimation and liveness detection, recent work has centered on face matching. Optimized for visa or passport style selfies and images, Yoti’s third-generation face matching model now shows a True Positive Rate (TPR) of 99.9 percent. Its False Positive Rate (FPR) shows that only one user in a million would be incorrectly matched.

For Robin Tombs, CEO of Yoti, those results are part of what makes its biometric tools a clear choice for politicians, operators and users concerned about what the legislating of digital identity verification means for data privacy. In a post on LinkedIn, Tombs says that, while politicians (in this case from the Conservative Party of Canada) demand age gating for porn without digital ID, “increasing numbers of legislators and regulators now understand the science that adults can choose a number of privacy preserving AV methods to anonymously prove age to porn sites.”

Tombs lists four age verification methods that Yoti offers, for all age ranges, which do not “involve any porn operator using age checks to identify an adult wanting to view legal porn anonymously.” Leveraging the Yoti app, selfie biometrics, liveness detection, and ID document authentication, users can trust that only the minimal relevant amount of information is being shared with the porn dealers.

Age verification more than just a bouncer for porn sites

The question of keeping kids off porn sites tends to get a lot of the attention around age verification. But Prendergast points out that the technology goes beyond keeping young eyes off too much flesh.

“MyFace Match is also useful to businesses because they invite users to opt-in to be ‘verified’ and then be required to provide consent whenever their image or content is published,” he writes. “In the case of live streaming, businesses can monitor the stream to ensure only consented individuals appear and flag to moderators when an ‘unverified’ individual is detected.” he also points to exclusion lists for gaming platforms as a potential use case.

And of course, there is social media. As TikTok faces scrutiny from the U.S. government and major players like Facebook and Instagram scramble to atone for social harms their platforms have caused, Yoti’s biometric face matching is a way to plug what may be the largest age verification hole in the history of digital media.

As a case study, it offers its work with Hong Kong-headquartered Riley Cillian, owner of chat apps LivU, Tumile and Yaar, which combined have over 100 million downloads and five million monthly active users in more than 40 countries.

“Riley Cillian has partnered with us for our world-leading age solution that can estimate a person’s age by just looking at their face,” says the case study document. “Using AI technology, this realtime age checking service uses an image to instantly estimate age within 1-2 years for most 16-25 year olds.”

“Those flagged as under the age threshold can prove their age with our ID verification technology, which is as simple as scanning an official ID document and taking a liveness selfie.”

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometric matching  |  biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  selfie biometrics  |  Yoti