Yoti reports surge in digital ID downloads as assessments of OSA’s impact begin

People and businesses in the UK have been interacting with the changes wrought to the internet by the Online Safety Act for less than a fortnight, but Yoti reports 6.5 million digital IDs have been downloaded domestically, partly on the strength of an 1,854 percent increase in downloads of its app in that time.

Yoti’s app appeared as high as second on Apple’s App Store listing when the OSA came into force, and when individuals chose reusable age assurance methods, a quarter of the time it is a Yoti digital ID, according to a company figures.

More than two-thirds (68 percent) of those using digital ID for age checks were 30 years of age or older.

The company’s outreach around the OSA has also included a pair of promotional videos, “Porno Pete” and “The Gimp,” which have together been viewed 7.5 million times. The advertisements emphasize that the company’s facial age estimation is anonymous, and protects the identity privacy of its users.

Trust pending results

A Financial Times column presents the Online Safety Act not as the end of a process which must be either lived with forever or resisted to the death, but as the opening salvo in an iterative process of crafting regulation to deal with unprecedented reality.

“The Online Safety Act is flawed in many ways. But I do think that it is a useful first step on the Chesterton principle that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” quips Stephen Bush.

He notes the Factory Acts of the 1800s, and the common reaction that laws governing child labor and working hours would ruin the nation, as a possible analogy for the OSA.

Bush also argues that the government should take responsibility for developing the tools to carry out the age verification and estimation the OSA mandates, rather than “a hodgepodge of service providers and verification services, some of which do not inspire a whole lot of confidence.” The huge uptick in VPN downloads in the wake of the OSA has as much to do with this lack of trust as it does with underage users seeking to circumvent the system, he suggests.

This leads to the suggestion that he be able to use GOV.UK, which does seem in the cards at some point, maybe even soon. In this way (rather than via small boat) Bush arrives at the suggestion that the UK will increasingly need ID cards, which “have always been popular with the public but they are unpopular in Westminister,” to carry out its policies.

The idea that age assurance technology providers are less reliable with people’s data than the UK government is one the industry must successfully push back on if it is avoid ceding major market share.

Article Topics

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