The ESRB wants to start using facial recognition to check people's ages
Remember a couple years ago, when Chinese gaming giant Tencent began using facial recognition to keep the kids from playing too many videogames? It turns out that the Entertainment Software Rating Board, North America's videogame rating agency, is looking to do something quite similar.
The ESRB, along with digital identity company Yoti and Epic Games-owned «youth digital media» company SuperAwesome, have filed a proposal with the FTC seeking approval for a new «verifiable parental consent mechanism» called Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation. Simply put, the parent takes a selfie, assisted by an «auto face capture module,» which is then analyzed by the system to ensure it's the face of an adult, who can then grant whatever permissions are required. The entire process of verification takes less than a second «on average,» and images are permanently deleted after the verification is complete.
«The upload of still images is not accepted, and photos that do not meet the required level of quality to create an age estimate are rejected,» the filing states. «These factors minimize the risk of circumvention and of children taking images of unaware adults.»
Of course, kids outsmarting the system isn't the only risk at play here. Accuracy strikes me as the big one, given that facial recognition technology is so notoriously racist: A study conducted in the US, for instance, found that Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be incorrectly identified by facial recognition systems than white people. And maybe I'm underestimating the magic at work here but determining whether someone is 16 or 18 based on a single selfie also strikes me as a real roll of the dice. The ESRB dismissed concerns about the
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