Our approach to assuring the age of users

Spotify offers personalized listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks for users around the world. But we know not all content or features are suitable for all audiences. To help enable age-appropriate experiences, we're continuing to better understand our users' ages.

We are committed to providing age-appropriate experiences, and we have a long history of building with safety by design, thanks to partnerships with industry experts like Thorn, the Tech Coalition, WeProtect Alliance, and the Internet Watch Foundation.

We are now expanding testing of improved age assurance technologies to select markets, utilizing our own internal age estimation technology and partnering with Yoti, a trusted digital identity company. This technology will help us identify if users are of eligible age to access some Spotify content and features.

Some users will now have to confirm their age by going through an age assurance process. For example, when a user attempts to watch a music video that has been labelled 18+ by the rightsholder for that video, Spotify may serve a prompt for that user to confirm the user's age. To do so, these users can use facial age estimation technology or ID document verification through Yoti's technology integrated into the Spotify app, built with privacy and security in mind.

After the age assurance process is complete, Yoti will delete all the user's data. Spotify will use the results of the process to improve our ability to provide an age-appropriate experience to all of our users. If a user does not meet the minimum age requirements for their market, the account will be deactivated and eventually deleted.

Understanding age online has been a decades-long challenge for technology companies - we're proud to partner with Yoti, as their innovations lead the industry and help companies like ours make progress against the challenge.

"We're proud to be working with Spotify to help create safer, age-appropriate experiences," said Robin Tombs, CEO at Yoti. "Spotify fans can access and enjoy a broad array of features and content, whilst young people will be better protected from the risk of accessing inappropriate experiences. We're excited to be working closely with the Spotify team on this innovative partnership - enhancing trust and safety for users around the world."

Our work and technology will continue to improve and optimize as we scale. To learn more about Yoti's approach, visit their website here.