We just deployed an update to introduce age verification for UK users to access adult content, per the requirements of the UK Online Safety Act. This has been rolled out for A-rated movies and games, with the other A-rated pages to follow in the upcoming days.
9/18 Update - This has now been rolled out for A-rated art and audio as well.
There are some changes from our initial plan; we had hoped to use credit card transactions alone as proof of age for UK users but there hasn’t been a method for us to single those out on our end. As a result, here is where we have ended up for UK visitors:
1. If your account is more than ten years old, we will assume you are over 18. This is in line with one of the methods of effective age assurance, which involves paying a third party to match your email address against some sort of database of scraped data, which determines if your email has been in use for a long time. We have our own long-term data, so we’re using that.
2. If your account ever bought Supporter status, we won’t be able to check for credit card status like we hoped, however we are having a one-time amnesty where if you paid for Supporter status more than five years ago and claim to be over 18, we will assume you are now at least 18.
3. If none of the above applies, you will have the opportunity to become a Supporter (to cover verification fees) and proceed with the new age verification process. We are using Yoti for age verification.
Newgrounds will not be viewing or retaining anything you submit as part of your verification, we only receive a pass or fail response from Yoti. The quickest option is to use their face scan feature, which I know makes people uncomfortable, however Yoti auto-deletes the image after returning a true or false value to Newgrounds.
Some notes:
1. The flow isn’t perfect at the moment. If you hit an A-rated page and aren’t a Supporter yet, the process will first prompt you to become a Supporter. Once you become a Supporter, you will need to find your way back to that page (it doesn’t flow back to that page automatically). When you come back to that page, you will be presented with the next step, performing age verification.
2. I had an experience where Yoti appeared to be stuck on the “Estimating Age” screen after taking my picture. After waiting a few minutes, I refreshed the page and tried again and it worked quickly the second time. The page on NG then responded to the successful verification and I was done.
3. I was tempted to title this post “Blue Monday” for you New Order fans.
ID checks will be needed in many more places where similar laws are being enacted, such as Europe and a growing number of US states. For now UK users are our test group so thank you for bearing with us through any rough edges.
