On March 21, China’s third-party mobile and online payment platform Alipay (支付宝) operated by Alibaba Group （阿里巴巴集团）has launched a new ‘Game Lock’ function to help parents monitor and management minors.
The new 'Game Lock' function issued by Alipay is intended to prevent minors from becoming addicted to games while ensuring parents' authority to manage game payments and game duration. As Alipay has partnered with mainstream game manufacturers in China, this function will allow parent to access to the game account by entering the password and a face-swiping verification prior to any payments.
Immediately after this function was launched, there are over 150,000 users who have used it for a month. This new function correlates with China's goal of protecting minors in the game industries while diminishing addiction habits.
In this case, Alipay has combined human-computer interaction, parent verification, and other technologies to identify minor users and apply relevant restrictions.
Furthermore, the 'Game Lock' function has been applied to over 70 mainstream game manufactures at present, including 4399 Network Co., Ltd as a leading gaming and entertainment platform in China. These gaming platforms will use Alipay verification for processing any payments but do not accept external stream like Apple Pay.
According to Alipay, the company is actively leveraging strengths in advanced technologies to help promoting youth protection in the online ecosystem. Meanwhile, the team has been devoted to developing more functions to support identification of deductions and various needs in different digital scenarios.