[truthfinder61]

Can you explain what is the bribe here?

Company A hires company B to offload the burden to do age checks, company B takes the burden to do it securely and only returns an age result to company A (no personal identifiable information).

Company A here could be any site, they are good at creating content, they should not be processing sensitive data. Company B is the expert, their job is to process personal data, confirm age, destroy data.

[beloch]

"The research team determined that the process Yoti uses to verify a person's age broadcasts the person's personal information to third- and fourth-party companies."

"When a bartender checks an ID, they quickly verify a customer's date of birth and identity before serving them. Companies like Yoti that employ digital age verification claim their products function the same way, but in a completely private manner."

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Company A is not the problem. They called the cops to do cop things. That's fine. Company B (e.g. Yoti) is the one that's operating like a cop. If Yoti is getting paid by those it shares user data with, that's corruption. If they're not being paid, then it's mere criminal negligence.

If governments are to mandate age verification, then they also need to implement privacy standards for the gatekeepers and enforce them.

[truthfinder61]

You have to read the paper (which in itself is quite speculative), but it never says that Yoti is broadcasting face images or ID document images to third or fourth parties. The paper analysed this Yoti platform that allows Company A to decide which age verification methods it wants to offer to their end users. These methods go from age estimation, ID document check and also old school credit card check.

Now credit card check to confirm someone's age is something that existed since ever, and it can only be done by interacting with a payment provider (which is the claimed third/fourth party in the paper) and I can assure you that no one gets paid by the payment provider so you can check a credit card, actually you have to pay them a fee. So in this case Company A is paying a fee to Company B that is running the age check and Company B has its own costs like paying the payment provider a fee to conduct the credit card check. Company B doesn't get paid by anyone else other than Company A, there is no bribe man.

You can clearly see the bias and political intention behind all of this, see also how they use the word "broadcasting" which has a very specific meaning (broadcasting is the distribution of something to a dispersed public audience) which is not what the paper is claiming, there is no broadcasting, any payment provider requires authenticated private and secure connection.

When it comes to the age estimation method and ID document, the paper does not claim that any of that is shared with third parties, as by tracking the network traffic it can see that it goes directly to Yoti. Yoti itself claims and audits his system to prove that any of the personal data they process never leaves their system and is immediately deleted as soon as the age check is done.

The reality is Company B has nothing to gain by keeping or sharing people's data because all they do is based on Company A trusting them and any risk that destroys that trust is unacceptable.

What this political campaign is doing is trying to cast doubts on that trust with lies. So that people like you go and do the campaign for them.

Yoti is being so heavily attacked because they proved that this can be done following high privacy standards, which annoyed quite a lot of people (think the big porn operators for example, which wouldn't be surprising if they are also donors for those privacy groups). It is all about money. If those privacy groups cared about your privacy they would be talking about Google/Apple that know everything you do, anywhere you go, any website or app you use, they even have your biometrics (they say on your phone sure). But as US companies they are obliged to share any data with the US gov if requested and can't tell that to anyone if they ever got that request.