Age Assurance Statement

Friendify is not an adults-only service. Most of Friendify is safe-for-work and open, including chatting with our starter characters without an account. Adult content is separate, and you cannot reach it until we have established that you are 18 or over.

The check happens on our servers, not in your browser. Hiding a button is not a control, so the block sits on the request itself.

We use Yoti to establish age. Yoti offers several kinds of check, and we allow three of them. You choose which one to use.

Facial age estimation

You take a live selfie. Yoti estimates your age from the image alone. It does not identify you and it is not compared against any document or database. We set the threshold at 21, not 18 — see "How they are used" below for why.

Digital ID

If you already hold a Yoti digital ID, you can share an over-18 confirmation from it. Where Yoti applies age estimation within this route, the same 21 threshold applies.

Document verification

You submit an identity document, and Yoti checks it is genuine and that it shows you are over 18. This is the route to use if you would rather not, or cannot, use the selfie check.

The threshold is 21, deliberately. Age estimation gives an estimate, not a birth date, so estimating right at 18 would let some under-18s through. We require an estimate of 21 or above. Adults between 18 and 21 may therefore be asked to use document verification or digital ID instead. That is the intended trade-off: we would rather inconvenience some adults than admit a child.

The checks are passive. You are not asked to perform actions on camera.

If the check cannot run, you do not get in. If our age assurance provider is unavailable, adult content stays closed and the request fails. We do not fall back to letting people through, and we do not fall back to asking you to declare your own age.

Once established, adult access is tied to your account. You are not re-checked on every message. If you delete your account, the sessions are revoked.

Region matters. Which policy applies is decided from your connection region. In the United Kingdom, adult content always requires a completed check.

Some things are sometimes presented as age checks. We do not treat any of these as age assurance, and none of them will get you into adult content:

Telling us your age

Self-declaration, a date-of-birth box, or ticking to confirm you are 18. We do not use these to open adult content.

Holding a payment card

We deliberately disable card-based age checks. Paying us is not proof of age.

Mobile network checks

Disabled in our configuration.

Our terms of service

An age statement in the terms is a rule, not a control. It is not age assurance.

The age check is run by Yoti. Your selfie or document goes to Yoti, not to us.

Friendify never receives or stores your biometric data, your date of birth, or your document images. What we keep is the outcome and the paperwork around it: a Yoti session reference, a pseudonymous reference we generate, the result, which method was used, the region, and the timestamps. That is what lets us prove the check happened without holding your face or your passport.

We send Yoti the session configuration and a pseudonymous reference. Our integration is designed not to require your name or email to perform the check. Yoti's own handling of the image is governed by Yoti's terms and privacy notice. How Friendify processes the outcome is covered in our Privacy Policy.

Age estimation can be wrong, and it can be wrong unevenly. If you are an adult and the check refused you, that is a problem we want to hear about — not an outcome you should have to accept.

You can try a different method: if the selfie check refused you, use document verification or digital ID. If none of the routes work for you, or you think you were refused unfairly, contact [email protected]. Tell us what happened; you do not need to send us your documents to complain. We record these reports and review them, because a check that fails a particular group of adults more often is a fault in the check, not in them.

You can also complain to us about how we handled your personal data, and we will acknowledge it. See Privacy Policy for that route and for your right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

We review this statement and the record behind it at least once a year, and before any change to how we check age goes live. We review outage and refusal rates monthly, and we re-read the regulator's guidance when it is updated.

This statement summarises a fuller internal record of our age assurance, which we keep as required by section 81 of the Online Safety Act 2023.