‘Authoritarian Nightmare?’: Using AI Facial Recognition Technology to Verify Kids Ages

The Washington Post highlighted the growth of private firms using artificial intelligence facial recognition technology to identify users’ ages. The technology is marketed to sites like TikTok as a means of preventing access to children.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week sued TikTok, accusing the platform of “flagrantly violating” the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the COPPA Rule and a 2019 decision by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding the illegal collection of children’s personal information.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, alleges TikTok collected “extensive data” from children under 13 without parental consent, allowed users under 13 to create and maintain accounts, and failed to comply with parental requests to delete their children’s accounts and personal information.

The lawsuit — the latest in a series of U.S. government actions against the platform — follows a complaint filed in 2020 by several advocacy groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), alleging TikTok violated COPPA.

In April, President Joe Biden signed a bill banning TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese parent company sells the social media platform’s U.S. assets by January 2025.

The DOJ’s announcement came on the heels of a Washington Post report Wednesday highlighting the growth of private firms using artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition technology to identify users’ ages. The technology is marketed to sites like TikTok as a means of preventing access to children.

According to the report, the technology — which is prone to false positives — has raised privacy concerns among parents. However, according to the Post, 19 states have passed laws requiring online age checks. However, those laws have faced legal and constitutional hurdles on censorship and free speech grounds.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told The Defender that “out of the efforts that our legislators and the U.S. government have been making to pursue TikTok and limit its reach, this is probably the most reasonable. This is one with teeth.”

Galperin noted, though, that other social media platforms have engaged in similar practices. She said:

“The DOJ has gone after other social media companies for COPPA violations. So has the FTC … When the House decided to single out TikTok for banning, over privacy violations and other types of behavior, I thought that this was pretty outrageous, and the reason for that was that there was almost nothing that the House was alleging that TikTok was done that was not already being done by just about every other social media company in the U.S.

“The only difference is that it was being done by a Chinese company and not a company located in Europe or the U.S.”

Galperin cited an example:

“We actually got the FTC to go and investigate Google over its tracking of children in Chromebooks years ago, where it turned out that Google was giving Chromebooks for free to schoolchildren, wasn’t supposed to track anything they did while they were in school, but was in fact gathering that data.”

Galperin said the EFF’s 2015 complaint against Google led to further regulatory scrutiny of Google’s practices.

According to Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, the use of facial recognition technology by social media platforms and other websites and online services poses a significant risk to children.

Hinchliffe said:

“The risks of AI facial recognition on children outweigh the benefits. Throughout our entire human existence, we’ve had people called parents to safeguard children. If a parent doesn’t want their child’s face collected and stored in a database, they should have the power and control to keep that technology from being used on their kids without prejudice.”

Hinchliffe also warned that the widespread use of such technologies by children could result in a normalization of their use.

“AI face scanning on kids’ programs teach them from an early age to accept that they don’t have privacy, and it is the next step towards a digital identity-driven internet passport to eliminate all anonymity,” Hinchliffe said…