PlayStation Update: Sony to Enforce Age Verification for Key Features
Sony is working with age verification service Yoti to determine if a user is eligible for an adult account, and there will be a few different options available to users. The check can be completed by completing a facial scan, uploading an identification document such as a driver’s license, or by using the information that a mobile provider has on file.
Failure to complete the age verification will result users being locked out from certain features, some of which include voice chat, text chat and messaging, joining parties, Discord voice chat and broadcasting gameplay to services like YouTube and Twitch. The silver lining is that the best gaming experiences on PlayStation are single player titles that don’t require any of these features.
Of course, as with most of these age verification platforms go, Sony says that it won’t be processing any user data and points to Yoti’s privacy policy. The privacy policy states that it doesn’t use the data for any other purpose than verifying a user’s age, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that data is completely safe. In fact, the company was levied a fine of a little over a million dollars by regulators in Spain for not properly securing user data.
It will be interesting to see how PlayStation gamers react to this upcoming requirement, because companies such as Discord have learned rather quickly that these age check requirements aren’t very popular with large swaths of their user bases. The pushback has been severe enough that it forced Discord to have to delay the timeline of when it’s going to roll out its own age verification system.
For now, this will only be a requirement for users in the UK and Ireland but will likely be enforced for users in other territories later down the line.
