On April 27, Yoti, a leading digital identity company, has partnered with SuperAwesome, a subsidiary of Epic Games, in its joint mission to provide children with a safe and compliant digital experience while also protecting their privacy.
Through the partnership, Yoti’s facial age estimation technology will be integrated into SuperAwesome’s Kids Web Services (KWS) verification dashboard.
The integration is aimed at providing parents with more control over their kids’ online activity, according to MCV Develop.
“We are proud to work with SuperAwesome to improve online safety for children and give parents a private way to prove their age. By integrating Yoti, people can just share the fact that they are an adult, without sharing any other personal information,” stated Julie Dawson, Chief Policy and Regulatory Officer at Yoti. “This data minimised approach protects the privacy of individuals, gives businesses confidence that someone is over the correct age to provide parental consent, and allows platforms to deliver age-appropriate content and experiences.”
More Insight Into the Partnership
SuperAwesome’s KWS is a high-end parent verification and consent platform that allows developers to obtain the consent of the parents or guardian accurately—in some cases, to confirm that the parent is an adult—while permitting their children access to features that collect personally identifiable information (PII).
The process is termed Verifiable Parental Consent (VPC). Countries such as the USA, EU, and the UK have made implementing VPC mandatory with digital services that deal with processing children’s PII.
SuperAwesome confirms that the parental consent and parent verification platform integrated with its Kids Web Service is certified under the ESRB’s Privacy Certified Kids Seal and the FTC’s COPPA Safe Harbor program by the kidSAFE Seal Program.
With technology continuously advancing, SuperAwesome has introduced the facial age estimation system by Yoti as one of the available age verification techniques in specific countries.
With the integration, SuperAwesome is committed to making parental verification easier, more convenient, and highly scalable.
Yoti, which has earned the publicly available specification PAS:1296 Age Checking, confirms that its age estimation tool doesn’t involve facial recognition or scanning children’s faces.
With Yoti’s integration, parents can now prove they are adults and over a certain age by taking a selfie—there’s no longer any need to share other sensitive personal information such as ID documents or monetary transaction details.
On the other hand, the VPC system verifies the identity of a parent or a legal guardian who has the permission to customise settings tied to children’s PII via authenticating a social security number, credit card transactions, or personal identity documents.
Built on top of facial analysis technology, Yoti confirms that with its age estimation tool, the image gets auto-deleted once the age check process is complete.
“SuperAwesome is excited to be working with Yoti to provide parents with a safe and trusted way to prove their age during the parent verification process,” said Paul Nunn, Chief Strategy Officer at SuperAwesome. “Given not everyone owns or has access to an ID or credit card, Yoti makes KWS more inclusive. In the time since integrating Yoti into KWS, over 60% of parents are choosing facial age estimation in the countries where it is available.”
Sohela is an electrical engineer and a self-professed writer with a keen interest in all things tech. When she’s not writing killer content pieces, you’ll find her enjoying tempting foods in her favourite restaurants.
