The identity verification market includes a wide range of platforms, from consumer-focused identity apps to powerful investigative tools. Two platforms that are frequently compared are Yoti, a UK-based digital identity app that lets users create a verified digital ID and share it with businesses, and facesearching, a face search engine that lets users find someone by photo across the public web. Yoti is best known for its consumer-facing digital identity app, which allows users to verify their identity once and then use that verified identity to prove their age, log into websites, and share identity attributes with businesses. facesearching, by contrast, is an investigative tool that scans the public web to find where a face appears online. While both platforms involve facial recognition and identity verification, they serve fundamentally different purposes and user bases. This comparison breaks down the differences to help you choose the right tool.
What Is Yoti?
Yoti, founded in 2014 and headquartered in London, is a digital identity platform that offers a consumer-facing app and a suite of business verification services. The Yoti app allows users to create a verified digital identity by scanning their government ID and taking a selfie. Once verified, users can use the app to prove their age (at retail locations, online, and in vending machines), log into websites without passwords, and share specific identity attributes (such as 'over 18' or 'verified name') with businesses without revealing their full identity document. For businesses, Yoti offers identity verification APIs that include document verification, facial recognition, liveness detection, and age estimation. Yoti is known for its strong stance on privacy and its commitment to minimizing data collection. The company has been certified under the UK's Age Verification Certificate scheme and is used by a range of businesses including retailers, social media platforms, and online marketplaces.
What Is facesearching?
facesearching is a face search engine that approaches identity verification from a different angle. Rather than creating a verified digital identity for the user, it enables users to search for a face across the public web. When a user uploads a photo, facesearching searches more than 100 platforms — including social media, news sites, blogs, forums, and video content — to find where that face appears online. The results reveal the subject's digital footprint, which can be used to verify identity, detect fraud, investigate backgrounds, and find connections. The platform is designed for investigative use: law enforcement working on cold cases, journalists vetting sources, individuals checking for catfishing and identity cloning, and businesses conducting enhanced due diligence. facesearching is built with privacy in mind — uploaded photos are deleted immediately after processing, and no permanent biometric database is maintained. The platform serves a global audience and is not tied to any specific regulatory framework or geographic region.
Key Differences: facesearching vs Yoti
- Core purpose: Yoti is a digital identity app — it creates a verified digital ID for the user to share with businesses. facesearching is a reverse face search engine — it finds where a face appears on the public web.
- User relationship: Yoti verifies the identity of the user (the person holding the app). facesearching lets users search for any face — their own or someone else's — on the public web.
- Verification method: Yoti verifies identity by scanning government ID documents and matching them to a selfie. facesearching verifies identity by matching a face against its public digital footprint on social media, news, and other platforms.
- Consumer offering: Yoti has a free consumer app for digital identity management. facesearching offers a free preview for reverse face search.
- Business offering: Yoti offers identity verification APIs for businesses. facesearching offers face search capabilities for investigative and due diligence purposes.
- Age verification: Yoti includes age estimation and age verification features. facesearching does not offer age verification.
When to Choose Yoti
Yoti is the better choice if you are an individual who wants to create a verified digital identity that you can use to prove your age, log into websites, and share identity attributes with businesses in a privacy-preserving way. If you are tired of carrying your passport to prove your age or sharing your full identity document with every website that asks for verification, Yoti's digital ID app provides a convenient alternative. Yoti is also the better choice if you are a business — particularly a retailer, social media platform, online marketplace, or age-restricted service — that needs to verify the age or identity of your customers. Yoti's age estimation technology, which can estimate a person's age from a photo without requiring an ID document, is a distinctive feature that is useful for age-gating content and services. Yoti's privacy-focused approach — minimizing the data collected and shared — is also attractive for businesses that want to verify customer identity without creating new privacy risks.
When to Choose facesearching
facesearching is the better choice if you need to find someone by photo and investigate their digital footprint, rather than verify your own identity for others. This is a fundamentally different use case from what Yoti offers. If you are an individual who wants to check whether a dating app match is using stolen photos, a journalist investigating a source, a landlord screening a tenant, a legal professional verifying a signatory, or a law enforcement officer working on a cold case, facesearching provides capabilities that Yoti does not and cannot offer. facesearching is also the better choice if you need to search across social media and public web content — Yoti does not offer any form of public web reverse face search. The two platforms are not really competitors; they serve different needs. Yoti helps you prove who you are. facesearching helps you find out who someone else is.
Privacy Philosophies Compared
Both Yoti and facesearching emphasize privacy, but their approaches differ based on their different functions. Yoti's privacy model is built around the concept of a user-controlled digital identity — the user decides what information to share, with whom, and for what purpose. The platform minimizes data collection and does not sell user data. facesearching's privacy model is built around data minimization and ephemeral processing — uploaded photos are deleted immediately after processing, and no permanent biometric database is maintained. This approach is appropriate for an investigative tool where the subject of the search may not be aware of or consent to the search, and where the retention of biometric data would create significant privacy risks. Both platforms are strong on privacy within their respective domains, and both take a more privacy-conscious approach than many of their competitors.
Yoti helps you prove who you are. facesearching helps you find out who someone else is. The two platforms answer different questions, and in the modern digital landscape, both answers are valuable.