The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has asked the FTC for approval to use facial recognition technology to help determine how old a user is. Using something called Privacy-Protective Facial Estimation, a person’s age would be estimated based on a photo to verify they are old enough to purchase a game.
According to an ESRB letter submitted to the FTC (via GameIndustry.biz), the ESRB will partner with Yoti, a digital identity firm, and SuperAwesome, an Epic Games subsidiary. The way it’ll work is once you buy a game, you’ll have to take a photo of yourself, then the system will check if the subject in the frame is human. After that, the image will upload to Yoti’s servers, where your age is calculated to ensure you meet the applicable ESRB guidelines.
One major concern this may have is storing photos–particularly those of minors–but according to the filing, “Images are immediately, permanently deleted, and not used by Yoti for training purposes.” As noted by Game Developer, facial recognition technology has encountered issues identifying people of color in the past, and it’s possible we could see similar issues here.
Facial age tech uses “computer vision and machine learning technology” to estimate one’s age by looking at the “patterns in an image of their face,” the ESRB told the FTC in its letter. Once the picture is taken, it’s converted “into numbers, and compares those numbers to patterns in its training dataset that are associated with known ages.”
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