Art by Clark MillerA Complex New Age of Face Tech
Increasingly, social media companies need to figure out how old someone is to meet safety concerns. Many are turning to little-known Yoti, a company with a past in gambling and digital IDs.
In September, Instagram unveiled a splashy new feature called Teen Accounts, an effort by Meta Platforms, the app’s owner, to show it’s better protecting young people with stricter privacy and safety settings. Suddenly, everyone on the app who had registered their age as 17 years or younger found themselves with an Instagram teen account, which is set to private by default and has stricter content and messaging restrictions.
As teens do, many rebelled against the change. Many hoped they could avoid the new restrictions by changing the birth date in their account to appear older. But the vast majority of them were stymied by facial analysis software that Instagram employed from a company called Yoti. Anyone changing their birth date had to either upload a photo ID or submit a video selfie to Yoti, which the company used to estimate their age and then deleted. How effective is it? Instagram’s tests of Yoti have found it detects more than 90% of underage users trying to cheat the system.
This age-estimation experience is becoming increasingly common. In recent years, through Instagram-like partnerships with other popular apps, Yoti has performed hundreds of millions of facial age estimations on users around the globe. Yoti first began developing the technology in 2018—a point in time when the concept was relatively nascent. “Lots of people said we were absolutely bonkers,” said Yoti CEO and co-founder Robin Tombs, a jovial and soft-spoken Brit.