Age verification at the door doesn't protect children inside the room.
The Online Safety Act requires platforms to know who is accessing their service. It does not yet require them to verify who remains present throughout the session.
The problem
Platforms have invested significantly in age assurance at the point of registration. A child cannot create an account without passing an age check. But once an account exists, legitimately created by an adult, there is no mechanism to verify who is operating it five minutes later, five months later, or at 11 pm on a school night. A minor using a parent's account, a child borrowing a sibling's phone, a verified adult sharing their login with a younger friend- from the platform's perspective, every one of these sessions is clean. The account was verified. The session was not. This is the presence problem. The Online Safety Act's age assurance requirements address access. They do not address presence. And as AI enables increasingly sophisticated bypasses of point-in-time verification tools, the gap between a verified registration and an unverified session is growing wider.
The Presence Gap
Platforms know who registered. They cannot verify who is operating the account in any given session — whether that's the account holder or a child using a borrowed device.
Account Sharing
A minor using a parent's account, a sibling's phone, or a verified friend's login is invisible to current platform controls. Every one of these sessions appears entirely legitimate.
AI-Enabled Bypass
Generative AI enables children to defeat point-in-time age verification tools — producing false documentation, synthetic images, and behavioural patterns that evade detection.
How YEO serves child safety online
Close the Presence Gap
Continuous on-device session verification confirms the verified account holder is the person active in the session — passively, without interrupting the experience.
No biometric data transmitted or stored — no new ICO exposure in a sector already under intense regulatory scrutiny.
Proportionate Under Ofcom Codes
A risk-based technical response to Ofcom's children's safety codes — providing session-layer presence assurance without creating new privacy risks.
Designed for consumer-facing platforms where low-friction is essential for legitimate users.
Built for Platform Scale
SDK-level integration into existing platforms. No rip-and-replace of existing age assurance infrastructure.
Closed-network messaging via the YEO Messaging SDK for platforms building identity-verified communities from the ground up.
Relevant Solutions
Closing the gap age verification leaves open
YEO CFR SDK
The YEO CFR SDK enables platforms to verify that the verified account holder is the person present in the session — passively, on-device, without transmitting biometric data or creating new ICO exposure.
