🛡️ Parental controls and family safety · 🏡 School apps, family logistics and safety
Yoti age checks and Digital ID app
By Yoti Ltd. Visit Yoti age checks and Digital ID app
Desk research from the maker's own pages. Not yet tried by us. Checked 2026-10-24.
Yoti is a UK company whose age checks families meet when an app, game or site asks a child or parent to prove their age; Epic's KWS, for example, offers a Yoti face scan for parents. The most common check is a selfie: Yoti's software estimates age from the face and checks it is a live person, then tells the app 'over' or 'under'. Yoti also offers ID document checks and a reusable Digital ID app.
Our take: Among the less invasive ways to pass an age check; parents should prefer the selfie estimate over uploading ID and think twice before setting up the Digital ID app for a teen.
Checked in a browser
A browser check on 2026-10-25: what loads, the ads and trackers we saw, and what a child meets first. Not a hands-on test.
| Child safety: 4 out of 5 | No ads or chat; a business-facing site whose demo video describes age checks for buying beer and matching dating profiles. |
|---|---|
| Data: 5 out of 5 | No third-party ad, tracking or analytics networks loaded before consent; the only outside host was the OneTrust consent tool. |
| Ease: 2 out of 5 | A consent box covers the middle of the screen and the page talks to businesses ('Talk to sales'); it is not meant for a child to use. |
| Cost honesty: 5 out of 5 | Nothing priced for families; 'Talk to sales' is aimed at businesses. |
What we found
- 1 third-party host contacted (cdn-ukwest.onetrust.com, the consent tool)
- 3 cookies set, none from third-party domains
- Consent box gives 'Reject all' the same weight as 'Accept all'
- 0 ad frames; 9 outbound link sites (social media, Yoti's own sites)
From the test: Yoti's own site is ad-free and loaded no trackers before consent; it is a business site that explains the age checks families meet elsewhere.
| Ages it suits | anyone asked to prove age; app accounts 13+ or the local consent age |
|---|---|
| What its terms say about age | The Digital ID app requires the digital age of consent where you live (13 in the UK, 14 in Spain and Italy, 15 in France, 16 in Germany and the Netherlands; 13 where no law sets it). Age checks inside other apps follow those apps' rules. (terms) |
| Price | Free. No charge is shown to people doing a check or using the app; businesses pay Yoti, and business pricing is not public (Oct 2026). |
| Works on | Web, iPhone and iPad |
| Account | No account needed |
| Ads | Not stated |
| In-app purchases | None |
| The AI in it | AI estimates a person's age from a live selfie and checks for spoofs and deepfakes. |
What's good
- Selfie check avoids sharing a name or ID
- Images deleted after the check
- Independently benchmarked by NIST
Watch for
- A face scan of your child is still biometric data
- Estimates can be off by a year or more near age cutoffs
- Digital ID app keeps face images over time
- App onboarding images may train the model
Data and privacy
For an age check Yoti takes a selfie (or an ID document), deletes the data after the check except IDs kept up to 28 days for manual review, and passes the result to the business. The app stores a face 'base image' and new face images over time; Yoti says only app onboarding images and consented data are used to train its age model, and that it does not sell data. Read the privacy policy.
Does it work?
NIST's open age-estimation evaluation found no single standout algorithm, with errors that vary by sex, region of birth and age, and are higher for women. Yoti claims an average error of 1.2 years for ages 6-12 and 1.3 years for 13-17.
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Where these facts come from
- https://www.yoti.com/
- https://www.yoti.com/business/facial-age-estimation/
- https://www.yoti.com/terms/
- https://www.yoti.com/terms/age-verification/
- https://www.yoti.com/terms/app/
- https://www.yoti.com/privacy/
- https://www.yoti.com/privacy/children-and-young-adults/
- https://legal.epicgames.com/epicgames/parental-consent
- https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/html/frvt_age_estimation.html
- https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/05/nist-reports-first-results-age-estimation-software-evaluation
Prices, terms and features change. Nobody paid to be listed, nothing here is an affiliate link, and Peabody never rates itself. Where we and the maker disagree, the maker's own pages are the ones to trust.