Today one of the biggest challenges for developers and content owners is enabling access for young audiences.
In order to enable features which may require personal data, such as content personalization, navigation, or push notifications, children’s privacy laws like COPPA and GDPR-K may require you to obtain the consent of parents and in many cases verify that the parent is an adult. This is called verifiable parental consent.
Securing verifiable parental consent creates a user experience where a child has to educate their parent, the parent has to go through the registration process, then verify their identity, and only then grant permission for their child. As painful to get through as the sentence is to read! And this has to be repeated every time a child wants to access a new digital experience!
Many developers look at the complexity (and cost) of the parent verification process and choose to simply avoid young audiences entirely. Large developers can afford to build their own solution (or license ours). Small developers don’t have that luxury.
Our Kids Web Services (KWS) platform already powers parent verification for some of the biggest games in the world, including Fortnite and Among Us. KWS delivers the most frictionless parent experience in the industry, thanks to its innovative ParentGraph. Once a parent is verified using KWS, they never need to provide their verification details again for any other service using KWS technology, minimizing personal data processing and providing a better user experience for both parents and players. Today, the ParentGraph includes millions of pre-verified parents and is growing rapidly.
While we are heartened to see more technology companies thinking about access and safety for their younger audiences, the future of the internet (and growth of the metaverse) requires kidtech tools to be available to everyone. The ability to execute at this kind of scale is exactly why we joined Epic Games last year.
Today we’re making our parent verification solution free for all developers. This is intended to achieve three outcomes:
- Remove the cost of doing the right thing for young audiences. There is now no economic barrier to implementing verifiable parental consent for any developer, which means more of them can say ‘Yes!’ to kid-safe experiences.
- A material improvement in parent user experience: Our ParentGraph means that parents need only verify their identity once and reduces the volume of personal data processing in the industry.
- Improving conversion rates for all digital experiences: every developer, big or small, gets the cumulative benefit of our pre-verified ParentGraph (which is ever-growing).
We believe that effective, free parent verification is essential for a safer internet for young audiences. You can access KWS parent verification for free through Epic Online Services or read more about it here. Or just get in touch if you’d like to talk more.