Meta recently announced that if the company detects a user under 18, it will ask them to confirm their age on Facebook Dating. The user must be over 18 to use the dating service.
How does it work? To use this service, the users need to verify their age by sharing a selfie video that Facebook shares with Yoti, a third-party company, or by uploading a copy of their ID. Then, according to Meta, Yoti analyses facial cues to make age estimations without identifying users.
Why now? The AI-backed verification scanner will aid in preventing children from using adult-only features. Adults don’t seem to be required to prove their age on Facebook Dating (such as ensuring a 45-year-old isn’t faking being 18).
Meta has used Yoti to check the age of Instagram users who try to modify their birthday to become 18 or older.
According to Meta, age verification has sorted “hundreds of thousands” of users into age-appropriate app versions. Yoti’s selfie feature is chosen by 81% of users who Instagram prompts to confirm their age.
However, the system’s accuracy varies depending on the user: According to Yoti’s research, its accuracy is worse for “feminine” faces and individuals with darker skin tones. As a result, concerns about how facial recognition and analysis software behaves differently for people based on their age, race, and gender have been raised by researchers.
Facebook’s facial recognition and privacy play
Last year, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said that it would no longer use facial recognition for photo tagging. As a result, the platform will delete the facial templates of more than a billion people and turn off its facial recognition technology, which uses an algorithm to identify people in photos that users upload on the social networking platform.
Data gathered from facial recognition is embedded with bias and privacy issues. As a result, many big companies have joined in the protest movements against facial recognition.
Moreover, it is impossible to talk about data consent without talking about the tech awakening by Cambridge Analytica and Facebook controversy. Back in the 2010s, the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica unlawfully obtained the personal information of over 87 million Facebook users, the bulk of whom were American, to use it primarily for political advertising.
The data was gathered using “This Is Your Digital Life” app, which data scientist Aleksandr Kogan and his business Global Science Research created in 2013. The program asked users a series of questions to create psychological profiles of them and used Facebook’s Open Graph technology to get the personal information of their Facebook friends. Cambridge Analytica used the data to support Ted Cruz and Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns in 2016, as well as Brexit.
Facebook’s reputation was heavily tarnished when the scandal broke to the public, and the Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion for data misuse. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also had to testify before Congress. Cambridge Analytica declared bankruptcy. All in all, the scandal was heavily covered by news organisations.
