#AgeAssurance technologies are gaining more visibility that they deserve. After all, age assurance is an indispensable responsibility for any business and organization that needs to implement digital safety by design for children.

On Friday, 07-07-2023, I had the pleasure to represent Privately SA in OECD – OCDE‘s Roundtable on Digital Safety by Design for Children. Policy experts, regulators, academics, and private enterprises have held panels for the various aspects of Digital Safety by Design: policy landscape, the best-practices, immersive technologies, and age assurance solutions.

Privately SA was invited to this event to provide technical expertise in the panel for Age Assurance. We had shared this panel with Russell Bagnall, Liz Thomas, Julie Dawson, and Bertrand Pailhès, under the moderation of Leanda Barrington-Leach

As a panelist, we have contributed to the draft OECD report with the following key points, which resonated strongly with all participants:

1. For today’s age assurance needs and constraints, there already exist audited and certified solutions such as Privately’s AgeAssure. #ageverification

2. Privately’s AgeAssure is a certified, accurate, privacy-preserving, spoof-resistant, #biometrics -based age estimation solution. It implements the Zero Data Principle, as it runs completely on the user device – no facial or voice data ever leaves the user’s device. #privacybydesign

3. Face-based and voice-based age assurance techniques are configurable, effective, feasible, inclusive AND proportional way of age checks for most of the use cases. #inclusivity #proportionality

4. Face recognition models learn age-invariant features to reliably identify individuals. On the other hand, age estimation models (such as our FaceAssure) learn identity-invariant features to reliably determine age. Therefore, age estimation technologies DO NOT identify individuals. #responsibleai

5. Thanks to anonymised & aggregated #analytics from AgeAssure, we can build a future where everybody wins: policy makers can base their work on more evidence, regulators can obtain companies’ transparency reports on demand, and companies can improve their products and services with the clear conscience of not using any personally identifiable data. #privacycompliance #knowyouraudience #data

We also noted with great satisfaction that regulators continue to coordinate their efforts. This makes it easier to comply with privacy regulations across the globe. And, with responsible innovation, platforms and technology providers will deliver online experiences with digital safety for design for children. #responsibleinnovation We thank everyone who took part in the discussions with their expertise and excellent questions. We look forward to fostering our collaborations!

Special thanks to Jeremy West, Andras Molnar and Lisa Robinson for the organization.

On 18-19 April 2023, we participated in biometrics workshop organized by Idiap Research Institute and European Association for Biometrics. There we had the opportunity to exchange knowledge with leading Academic, Industrial, and State experts: on the best practices on processing, securing, and respecting the data privacy with biometrics, as well as the DeepFakes, presentation attacks, video injections, and their corresponding alleviations. We presented our company’s approach in addressing these challenges, which have been received very positively by these valuable experts.

Indeed, Presentation Attacks, Deep Fakes, Morphing attacks, Video Injection attacks, etc. have been evolving for a long time. This has recently created some hype in public conversations, and some even haphazardly suggested dropping biometric checks altogether in age assurance. In stark contrast to these perceptions, these attack vectors have been in the radar of biometrics experts for many years, and they have been studied very well. The countermeasures evolve faster than the problems can spread, and they are available for industry players to apply.

Indeed, Privately SA’s age estimation technology has its roots in rigorous research, in collaboration with IDIAP and EPFL. Our on-device, real-time liveness check architecture is resilient by design to many such attacks, especially video injection and Deepfakes. When it comes to determining the age of a user, we see that biometrics-based solutions are very well suited – and we’ve got our UKGDPR, EAL2, EAL1 certifications and regulator audits to prove it. Biometrics-based age estimation also works much better than other approaches – self-declaration, credit cards, database checks on phone numbers/credit scores, etc. have their own problems in efficacy and privacy, and they’re much easier to be spoofed by malicious actors.

Thank you Dinusha Frings, Marcela Hernandez, and Sébastien Marcel for the organization of the workshop, and we’re looking forward to many fruitful exchanges in this domain.

#biometrics #antispoof #livenesscheck #privacybydesign #deepfakes #ageassurance #ageverification #presentationattacks #ai #ageestimation #gdprcompliant #gdpr