ESRB wants to make it easier to harvest kids' personal data | This Week in Business
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Is technology that guesses people's age based on their appearance a valid tool to confirm parental consent?
The ESRB is hoping so, as the North American ratings board is asking the US Federal Trade Commission to make facial age estimation one of the approved methods of verifiable parental consent (VPC) under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Joining the ESRB in this request are Yoti, a developer of such technology, and SuperAwesome, which runs the free parental consent management platform Kids Web Services as well as kid-focused advertising and influencer marketing businesses.
The application was first made in June, but when word of it started making the rounds this week, there were concerns expressed about a shiny new technology based on a machine learning algorithm aimed at children (or rather, aimed at preventing children from passing themselves off as adults).
Given the litany of harmful activities already empowered by black box technology that was not created with the explicit goal of causing harm, some pushback should be expected. After all, such technology is already revolutionizing the fields of automobile collisions, legal malpractice, worker exploitation, sexual extortion, eating disorders and union busting AT THE SAME TIME, racist policing, stalking, and so much more.
The ESRB would rather not be associated with any of that, naturally, and once the news of its FTC application started making the rounds, it reached out with a statement.
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