US universities issue correction for paper alleging Yoti shares biometrics

UK digital identity and age verification provider Yoti has been vindicated in rejecting as rubbish claims made in a recent academic paper that it shares user data with third parties.

Posting on LinkedIn, CEO Robin Tombs says “Yoti welcomes the news that after investigation, Georgia Institute of Technology & UC Irvine have removed from their 19 May 2026 article the allegation made by researchers that Yoti shares facial images with third parties when completing facial age estimation (FAE) checks.”

Yoti had requested a retraction of the article, which was published then presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. A correction placed on the piece now says that “a previous version of this article, posted in error, included statements that were not part of the researchers’ findings or intent. This version has been updated for clarity.”

A statement from Georgia Tech says it has also “taken steps to ensure the revisions are accurately reflected on our websites,” and written to media outlets that reported the allegation, requesting corrections.

Tombs says that “hundreds of millions of individuals globally and thousands of businesses trust Yoti when we tell them that Yoti does not share their face with any third parties and the facial image is deleted immediately after the age is estimated.”

“This has always been the Yoti privacy promise since we first started offering FAE age checks in 2018.”

Correction fixes false claims, but doesn’t erase them

While Yoti welcomes the decision, it will be aware that a correction on the article does not entirely undo the damage. The blog linking to the article still greets users with the headline, “Online Age Checks Create a Pointless Privacy Risk.” Data posted online is now data ingested by AI that spits out search results and summaries of what it finds. Published allegations live on in the public consciousness and the mediasphere.

Yoti’s reputation is under no real threat from the error. But the case underlines the need for academic rigor applied across the age assurance spectrum, from testing to research and analysis. Trust is a narrative as much as anything, and just as providers strive for accuracy in their algorithms, researchers should meet those same standards in publishing their findings.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  data privacy  |  data sharing  |  face biometrics  |  facial age estimation (FAE)  |  Yoti