Company or Institution

Yoti

Industry

Internet

Website

https://www.yoti.com/

Country

United Kingdom

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

General description of the AI solution

You don’t need to know someone’s name to know they’re the right age – you often don’t even need their date of birth. At Yoti, we’ve built a range of tools that let individuals prove they’re the right age to buy a product or access a service without sharing any personal information.

Yoti’s facial age estimation is an effective, secure age-checking service that can estimate a person’s age by looking at their face. There is no need for a physical check of ID documents or human intervention, offering a faster and safer way for someone to prove their age.

The technology has been trained to estimate age by looking at facial features in an image. To the technology, the image is simply a pattern of pixels, and the pixels are numbers. Yoti’s facial age estimation technology has been trained to spot patterns in numbers, so it learns ‘this pattern is what 16 year olds usually look like’, ‘this pattern is what 6 year olds look like’. A privacy preserving solution, the technology never knows or learns the name or identity of a person. There’s no need for an ID document and no personal data is held or shared.

Yoti’s facial age estimation is built in accordance with the ‘privacy by design’ principle in the UK GDPR. No individual can be identified by the model and it encourages data minimisation because it only needs a facial image. Yoti immediately deletes all images of users after their age has been estimated. The model cannot infer anything else about a person nor can it uniquely identify a person.

We built our age estimation technology to give everyone a secure and private way of proving how old they are in different everyday scenarios: from age checking on social platforms and online stores, to supermarket self-checkouts.

Github, open data repository, prototype or working demo

https://yoti.world/yoti-age-estimation-demo/
https://github.com/getyoti

Publications

Yoti whitepaper 2022 -https://www.yoti.com/wp-content/uploads/Yoti-Age-Estimation-White-Paper-May-2022.pdf

Yubo using facial age estimation – https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/yubo-is-about-to-verify-the-age-of-all-its-users-using-facial-age-estimation/
Meta using facial age estimation – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61828900

Needs