As OSA kicks in, Yoti sees 25% spike in traffic, lands at number two on Apple charts

UK age assurance provider Yoti has hit the charts in a big way following the activation of the Online Safety Act. The Yoti digital ID app has surged to number two on the Top 20 UK iPhone App Store Table, jumping ahead of OpenAI’s widely-used large language model, ChatGPT.

Posting on LinkedIn, Yoti CEO Robin Tombs notes a “crazy volume of UK installs yesterday,” and reports “so far volumes 25 percent higher like-for-like today.”

The only app topping Yoti on the table? That would be Proton VPN – one of four virtual private network (VPN) apps in the top ten. VPNs allow users to hide their IP addresses, meaning they can behave as though located outside the UK. Tombs says it’s no surprise seeing the spike in VPN downloads, as users try and work around age verification requirements to access adult content.

According to Mashable, Proton VPN reported a 1,400 percent hourly increase in signups over its baseline on July 25, when the new age verification requirements came into effect.

But, Tombs says, “seeing Yoti at number 2 shows a lot of UK individuals want a private way to digitally prove their age (or ID)” to accommodate the laws.

The GOV.UK One Login app sits at number 10 on the list.

Social media platform Bluesky recently selected software from KWS, a subsidiary of Fortnite developer Epic Games that uses biometrics-based age estimation from Yoti, to ensure compliance with the OSA.

Some will penetrate protections with VPNs but fewer kids will stumble on porn

The VPN issue is something of an elephant in the room wherein age assurance is being discussed. A piece in The Verge puts it plainly: “the UK’s new age-gating rules are easy to bypass,” it says in a bold headline. “Most of the age verification requirements for online platforms can be circumvented by a simple VPN.”

It is true that VPNs are a familiar technology well within the grasp of most 14-year-olds. However, as Iain Corby of the Age Verification Provider’s Association is fond of noting in response, laws shouldn’t be discounted simply because they can be broken.

A recent post on AVPA’s LinkedIn page addresses what it calls the “VPN fallacy”:

“Some more sophisticated, usually older, children will make use of a VPN,” it says. “But already, this will be limited to those who are deliberately seeking adult content and are determined to do so – children will no longer stumble across porn nearly as often (36 per cent of 9-19 year-olds have been taken unintentionally to a porn site when looking for something else).”

“More importantly, the adult sites remain 100 percent liable if they allow children to access ‘primary priority content’ – porn, suicide, self-harm, diet – regardless of whether those children use a VPN or not.”

Like physical fences, age gates will keep out some, not all – but they make it less likely that someone will wander into a hole by accident.

Article Topics

age verification  |  AVPA  |  biometric age estimation  |  Online Safety Act  |  UK  |  UK digital ID  |  VPN (virtual private network)  |  Yoti