(Pocket-lint) — Yubo has been making waves in the social platform market ever since the app started attracting numerous Gen-Z users.
While ensuring that young users can connect safely and authentically with their peers has always been a challenge for social platforms, it is a challenge that Yubo has committed to addressing.
Regardless of the medium, there are always potential scammers and even people with ill intentions that do what they can to infiltrate a platform and take advantage of its audience. That’s why tools such as age verification have become so essential in the online world.
Yubo has always taken the matter of user safety quite seriously, but this new approach to age verification is setting a new precedent in the industry when it comes to protecting communities of online users.
Read on to learn all about Yubo’s novel age verification method that is revolutionizing online safety.
Yubo partnered with digital identity provider, Yoti, to implement this new age verification system, designed specifically to be very straightforward and accessible. This is done on purpose to make the age verification process as seamless as possible for its users.
The method requires users to take a real-time selfie within the Yubo app. This isn’t a regular photo, though, but a short video that is then analyzed by Yoti’s liveness algorithm to confirm the photo is being taken in real-time and is not a false image pulled from Google or the internet. Then, Yotis’ age estimation technology analyzes the photo and estimates the user’s age. After that, the estimation is compared with the age that the user provided on their profile when signing up. If the two match, the user’s age is verified successfully.
On the other hand, if the information doesn’t match, users will need to go through an additional process to verify their age.
All this might sound like science fiction, but Yubo has made it a reality.
Here’s what’s happening under the hood while the verification system is running.
First, we should clarify why Yubo takes a video instead of a photo. The reason is actually quite simple: the video proves that the user is sending a genuine recording rather than an image from an online source. The demand for a real-time recording is made for the same reason — to confirm image authenticity.
The actual technology that estimates the user’s age based on facial features is the fascinating part of the process. This technology is powered by Yoti, an industry-leading online privacy and security service that utilizes and develops advanced tools.
If you’re wondering how reliable such an algorithm might be, the answer is — pretty reliable. The technology that estimates age has 98.9 per cent accuracy.
The ultimate goal of Yubo age verification
Back in May, Yubo launched the beta stage of this new age verification tool in a limited capacity. At first, the tool was available only for users of 13 and 14 years of age, but the goal was to have every user on its platform age verified.
The ultimate goal behind this is, naturally, the complete online security of Yubo members. But the platform doesn’t want to make that solution half-baked. Following the first successful trial, the deployment of this new technology has been accelerated and now 100 per cent of IOS users are verified, three months ahead of schedule. The new age-verification technology will be fully deployed to Android users, who make up roughly 10 per cent of users on Yubo, in the coming weeks.
Going hand-in-hand with these advanced layers of user security, Yubo made sure that the process still left space for the protection of its users’ data and privacy.
Since the process relies entirely on the algorithm that analyzes the image, there’s no need for personal documents, personal IDs or any private information (unless a user’s verification fails). Users can verify their age and continue using the app without jeopardizing their data. Yoti’s technology is also privacy-friendly, as the system has no way of retroactively linking a name or an identity to an image provided.
Using the power of technology to create a safe environment
Empowering younger generations has been Yubo’s mission from the start. The new age verification system that the platform introduced strengthens that mission even further. With the novel technological solution behind its development, Yubo will continue to grow as a social platform. And unlike many other platforms, Yubo is willing to drive away a portion of its user base if it means making the app as safe a place as possible for its 60M users from all around the world.
If you want to see the platform and its features in action, jump to yubo.live and join the Gen-Z revolution.
This article originally appeared on https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/162731-yubo-rolls-out-innovative-age-verification-to-all-users