The Authority of a Parent: In Question?
August 3, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
If we cannot scan the kids, let us scan the guardians. That is what the ESRB, digital identity firm Yoti, and kiddie marketing firm SuperAwesome are asking the Federal Trade Commission according to The Register‘s piece, “Watchdog Mulls Online Facial Age-Verification Tech—For Kids’ Parents.” The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires websites and apps to make kids under 13 get a parent’s permission before they can harvest that sweet, early stage personal data. It is during the next step the petitioners would like to employ age-verification software on the grown-ups. As writer Jessica Lyons Hardcastle describes, the proposed process relies on several assumptions. She outlines the steps:
“1. First, a child visits a website and hits an age gate. The operator then asks the kid for their parent’s email, sends a note to the parent letting them know that they need to verify that they’re an adult for the child to proceed, and offers the facial-age scanning estimation as a possible verification method.
2. (Yes, let’s assume for a moment that the kid doesn’t do what every 10-year-old online does and lie about their age, or let’s assume the website or app has a way of recognizing it’s dealing with a kid, such as asking for some kind of ID.)
3. If the parent consents to having their face scanned, their system then takes a selfie and the software provides an age estimate.
4. If the age guesstimate indicates the parent is an adult, the kid can then proceed to the website. But if it determines they are not an adult, a couple of things happen.
5. If ‘there is some other uncertainty about whether the person is an adult’ then the person can choose an alternative verification method, such as a credit card, driver’s license, or social security number.
6. But if the method flat out decides they are not an adult, it’s a no go for access. We’re also going to assume here that the adult is actually the parent or legal guardian.”
Sure, why not? The tech works by converting one’s face into a set of numbers and feeding that to an AI that has been trained to assess age with those numbers. According to the ESRB, the actual facial scans are not saved for AI training, marketing, or any other purpose. But taking them, and their data-hungry partners, at their word is yet another assumption.
Cynthia Murrell, August 3, 2023
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
