As spotted by GamesIndustry.biz, the ESRB is joining forces with the firm Yoti, an expert in facial recognition, and the subsidiary of Epic Games SuperAwesome, dedicated to the digital protection of young people, to support their proposal. The idea is to scan an individual’s face – using a smartphone, for example – by taking a photo and sending it to Yoti’s servers. Once analyzed, the image is instantly destroyed, promised sworn, and the service validates or not the acquisition of a game prohibited to minors according to their estimation of the age of the person.
An old problem of young people
The ESRB hammers home that “if there are any risks inherent in this method, they are easily outweighed by the benefits provided to consumers and businesses.“Alright. Although we imagine that this technology could be optional (conditional on the activation of parental controls, for example), the ESRB did not specify the terms of use of this new system, which would obviously be limited to American territory.
Let’s remember for all intents and purposes that the latest studies on facial recognition show that modern systems are often mistaken about the identity of black and Asian people, about gender… and about age, as explained by Dr. Joy Buolamwini in the columns of the American newspaper WGBH. The fault, partially, of the data used to “train” the systems, still too incomplete to represent Humanity with fidelity. If the flaws in this technology are to be gradually corrected, conditioning purchases – physical or digital – on a facial scan in 2023 is something to raise eyebrows.
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