Good Morning, Brit Xbox Fans – Ready To Prove Your Age?
Microsoft has begun emailing users of its Xbox gaming platform with likely unwelcome news: users will need to verify their age if they want to keep access to the company’s various social services, and it’s blaming the UK Online Safety Act.
“As part of our compliance program for the UK Online Safety Act and our ongoing investments in tools and technologies that help ensure age-appropriate experiences, we’re introducing age verification for Microsoft accounts in the UK,” the company told registered Xbox users in a blanket email – including users whose accounts are officially old enough to drink, dating back all the way to the launch of what was then known as the Xbox Network in 2002.
“Age verification is a new feature being introduced for players logging into an Xbox experience with Microsoft accounts based in the UK. It helps ensure that we can continue to provide players on our platform with age-appropriate experiences and keep the Xbox community safe.”
The UK Online Safety Act was signed into law back in 2023, with the requirement that online service providers introduce “highly effective” age checks – putting an end to the web’s classic “Are you over 18? Yes/No” honesty-driven age gating, at least for those who want to legally provide their services to UK citizens. Of the various options on offer, many providers have turned to age estimation. Punters are told to peer into their smartphone’s selfie camera and, typically, smile or open their mouths, and a machine learning model in the cloud has a stab at guessing whether they’re of age or not.
Since the act’s enforcement began earlier this year, locked-out young’uns have, unsurprisingly, found a variety of ways around the age-verification requirement – from using virtual private networks to appear as if they’re outside the UK, which has led the children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza to demand that VPN providers themselves are added to the list of age-gated services, to using generative artificial intelligence to create fake passports or the photo mode of popular video games to fake interactive selfies.
Even though the age-gating can be easily bypassed, companies are still required to implement it – and implement it Microsoft has, partnering with UK firm Yoti to provide age estimation, ID verification backed by government-issued documents, mobile contract verification, and credit card verification options.
Yoti started out as a digital identity provider, and won its first government contract in 2018 to provide digital ID services to the population of Jersey, before pivoting to real-time age estimation and document-backed age verification for gambling, adult entertainment, and other age-gated services. Naturally, the UK Online Safety Act has been something of a boon for the company – even as it causes the privacy-conscious to grind their teeth.
We asked Yoti how it avoids issues such as susceptibility to generative-AI document forgeries or the use of videogame “photo mode” to fake interactive selfies. Julie Dawson, Chief Policy and Regulatory Officer at Yoti, told The Register it had “multiple layers of protection to guard against the types of attacks mentioned. We use a number of advanced checks, including document authenticity checks, liveness detection and injection attack prevention to ensure that a real person is physically present during the verification process, and not simply presenting a static image, deepfake or manipulated media from tools like video game ‘photo modes’.”
She added: “You may have seen previous coverage highlighting that, whilst no solution is perfect, Yoti’s facial age estimation technology has not been reported to be successfully spoofed (unlike other age verification firms – have a look at the Death Stranding breach as an example) using these methods, which is a testament to the strength of our mechanisms.”
We asked how it keeps people’s data under wraps, and Dawson replied: “The design of these methods means that only the age result is passed to the platform – i.e. the platform only knows this particular user is under 18 or 18+.”
Those who choose not to verify their age, Microsoft has confirmed, will retain access to their existing games and other media as well as the ability to buy more – including age-restricted titles. It’s the social side of gaming that will be locked off: voice and text chat, party functionality and game invites, and the ability to share user-generated content will be limited to “Xbox friends” only, while the “Looking for Group” and custom club features will be blocked off entirely.
The block will also extend to third-party social services accessible through the Xbox platform, Microsoft announced. Unless an account has jumped through the age-verification hoops, its owner will no longer be allowed to use the Discord chat service nor stream gameplay to Twitch. Verifying their age – or someone’s age, at least – will remove the blocks and restore full functionality.
Microsoft is giving its users a grace period. The age restrictions won’t come into play until “early 2026,” though age verification is available from today. More information is available on the Xbox support site. ®
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