Yoti and SuperAwesome will partner up to improve app safety for children

Digital ID firm Yoti has announced a new partnership with the Epic Games-owned company SuperAwesome. 

As part of the partnership, Yoti will provide SuperAwesome with its child safety and facial age estimation tools for its SuperAwesome’s Kids Web Services package, which helps developers to verify the identity of the adults granting children permission to use features that may collect personal data.

Their Verifiable Parental Consent (VPC) system endeavours to ensure both corporate and consumer compliance with privacy laws, and typically involves a credit card transaction or review of official identity documents. Yoti’s facial age estimation tools will now add another option to the process in applicable territories, but will require only a selfie.

After going through this process to prove they are an adult, a user can still review the settings and features of games and apps to determine whether their child can use it, and will have the same access to the full suite of safety tools as any other verified user. 

Yoti has said that the option ‘offers people a secure way of proving they are over a certain age, without sharing their name, ID or credit card information’, and that ‘no personal information is ever stored’ as part of the process, so it is sure to be appealing to those that would like to maintain their own bubble of digital privacy. 

“We are proud to work with SuperAwesome to improve online safety for children and give parents a private way to prove their age,” said Julie Dawson, director of regulatory and policy at Yoti. “By integrating Yoti, people can just share the fact that they are an adult, without sharing any other personal information. 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.”

“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. 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,” added Paul Nunn, chief strategy officer at SuperAwesome.