Technology that estimates how old someone is based on their face geometry may soon be used to verify internet users' ages, if an approach submitted to the US government gets the green light.
While adults and teenagers' information is largely fair game, America does have significant privacy protections for the under-13s thanks to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Now the entertainment industry would like an exception to these strict rules to allow facial scanning for automated age verification purposes, albeit with a twist: the age verification will be used on the parents.
The US Federal Trade Commission is considering an application [PDF] from the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), digital identity firm Yoti (which makes the facial age estimation tech), and its partner SuperAwesome (which teams with advertisers to help them target kids online), to allow such technology to be used.
The three organizations have asked the FTC to approve the use of Yoti's age-estimating tool under COPPA's tough rules.
The law requires websites and apps to direct kids under the age of 13 to obtain their parents' permission before collecting or using the youngsters' personal info. There are a number of ways sites and services can go about obtaining parental permission to siphon kids' data - and the law allows interested parties to propose new consent methods to the FTC for consideration.
Which brings us to the age-guessing tech. According to Yoti, it uses a "combination of AI technology, liveness anti-spoofing and document authenticity checks" to determine a netizen's age.
Here's how the organizations say the Yoti tech would enable parental consent under COPPA:
According to the application, Yoti and SuperAwesome have implemented the so-called "Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation" technology for legally required parental consent in places outside of the US since 2022.
During that time, the partners say they have provided more than 4.8 million of these types of age estimates, and they claim that this method can accurately determine if someone is an adult 99.97 percent of the time. Now they'd like to bring it to the Land of the Free.
That "Privacy-Protective" part of the name is intentional. The partners claim that the tech addresses privacy concerns because it doesn't collect or process identity or payment card information nor store user images.
"The system takes a facial image, converts it into numbers, and compares those numbers to patterns in its training dataset that are associated with known ages," according to the FTC application. It adds:
When asked about privacy concerns related to the face-scanning tech, an ESRB spokeserson told us: "The live scans used for this process are never stored, used for AI training, used for marketing, or even sent to the operator; the only piece of information that is communicated to the operator is a 'Yes' or 'No' determination as to whether the person is over the age of 25."
SuperAwesome's Kids Web Services uses the tech in its parental consent tool as a verification method that it sells to developers outside America, and Fortnite maker Epic Games is one of these customers.
Yes, this is the same Epic Games that, last year, paid the FTC a record $520 million for violating COPPA - so it just might have not been the best customer to highlight in the application. ®
https://www.theregister.com//2023/07/21/age_verification_tech/
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Aug 02, 2024