Age verification expands in gaming: Minecraft selects Yoti, Discord tests Persona

Minecraft players in the UK with adult accounts will have to complete age checks starting in February to continue using the game’s social features like chat.

Emails sent to players from Minecraft owner Microsoft warn them of the upcoming change, and state that Yoti is providing age verification. They also make clear that those who do not perform age verification will still be able to play the game and utilize its other features, including purchases.

“Critics and privacy advocates have warned that large-scale age verification systems carry inherent risks, including potential data breaches, identity fraud, and misuse for large numbers of people,” Gaming Bible worries.

Then again, Fortnite has been using Yoti’s age checks since 2023 without any signs of a breach, which goes unmentioned in the article.

Yoti’s facial age estimation and age verification have been used for more than a billion age checks, CEO Robin Tombs says in a LinkedIn post celebrating the company’s inclusion on the Sunday Times 100 Tech list. Yoti is the 47th fastest-growing private technology company in Britain over the last three years, according to the list. The company made its debut on the list last year.

The company also become profitable and expanded its customer base over the past year as age assurance regulations began rolling out around the world.

Age check discord strikes Discord, Roblox

Discord is taking a proactive stance in Australia, instituting age checks despite not being classified as an Age-Restricted Social Media Platform under the Social Media Minimum Age Act. The new system mirrors that implemented in the UK to comply with the Online Safety Act.

k-ID provides the technology, which includes facial age estimation or ID document-based age verification.

Checks will be applied when users attempt to unblur “sensitive content,” turn off the message requests feature the allows users to screen direct messages, and access certain channels.

Users in the UK may be directed to Persona for age checks under what Discord calls an “experiment.”

A breach allegedly traced to Discord’s third-party customer support supplier Zendesk exposed approximately 70,000 government-issued ID documents last October in a case of over-retention of data, and possibly facial photos as well.

Persona blurs all the data on ID documents except the photo and date of birth, according to Discord’s announcement.

Roblox also uses Persona’s facial age estimation for chat access, and Wired says that game’s system “is a complete mess.”

The publication found age-verified accounts for people as young as nine years old for sale on eBay and notes hundreds of claims of inaccurate age assessments on social media.

Some of those users provided videos which show spoof attacks succeeding, calling into question the effectiveness of the facial age estimation algorithm and the liveness detection layer that compliments it.

The article quotes a Roblox developer asking “Why are we still pushing this change?,” underlining a tension that is central to the epidemic of hand-wringing over age checks for online platforms: many users who have not experienced online harms refuse to acknowledge them, or accept the need for changes made to address them.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometric age estimation  |  Discord  |  facial age estimation (FAE)  |  gaming  |  k-ID  |  Minecraft  |  Online Safety Act  |  Online Safety Act (Australia)  |  Persona  |  Roblox  |  Yoti