UK Home Office pendono da £ 1,3 milioni per l’algoritmo che indovina la tua età
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/home_office_age_algorithm/
di This_Head_7578
UK Home Office pendono da £ 1,3 milioni per l’algoritmo che indovina la tua età
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/home_office_age_algorithm/
di This_Head_7578
23 commenti
This is driven by the glut of asylum seekers who say they’re 16 so they can avoid detention while their case is considered. Some will be but it’s statistically implausible they all are.
However this’ll be a disaster because they’ll train it on faces of westerners and then use it to deny Afghans, when boys from that part of the world can have a full beard by 16.
A major problem with this is that people don’t mature at the same rate in different parts of the world, malnutrition and other stresses can have a big impact on how and when puberty happens.
I heard a youtuber speculating the other day that youtube/google guess your age based on the content that you watch. For example watch lots of minecraft/roblox videos and you’re probably young, watch lots videos about niche 80s movies you’re probably over 18. The former will get challenged to prove their age whislt the latter won’t when trying to view certain content…
Dental x-rays are pretty accurate for children and adolescents, not so much for adults. The again I’m assuming they don’t care about how old an adult is, just that they are one. Not sure why they were considered wrong.
Why is this needed? You can accurately determine age with a noninvasive saliva test.
So fed up with the dozy draconian nonsense the Labour government think everyone wants.
import random
def guess_age():
return random.randint(18, 99)
return 100 * Maths.random();
Give me money please.
There’s AI systems in development that are reasonably accurate at this. I had to review some of them for a job I had a few years back. They were around 98% accuracy for determining over or under 18 based on facial assessments, and around 92% accuracy for determining age within 3 year bands. Its major failing was that accuracy dropped down into the mid 70s for black and indian women older than 40, and for white men with life long low socio-economic attainment.
But that was 3 or 4 years ago I was looking at it, and I imagine they’ve been continuing to train the models and refine them.
Honestly though, 1.3 million is small beans compared to the amount of money some of those companies were getting in investor funding. They’ll make next to no money off this contract but it’ll be a great opportunity for one of these companies to show case its product being actively used, and will almost certainly lead to that company getting other more profitable contracts.
Same people who will defend using this technology on migrants will lose their shit when it’s used to decide whether they can watch porn or not
Zero privacy Labour spending money on this is just ridiculous. US companies being paid to steal our biometrics and personal data but now with a bonus.
Ok.
1. Garbage journalism. An algorithm that *guesses* your age? If your input is the equivalent of “guess this person’s age” then don’t be too upset when you get a *guess* as an output.
2. Garbage governance. Quite why they feel the need to employ algorithms when we have medical procedures that already do this to the accuracy they want… I have no idea. Easy way to transfer more money to the tech bros I guess?
*(The medical procedures we have already are hand and wrist x-rays to determine bone development and ossification centres, or DNA methylation profiling. If you don’t need such accuracy I guess we could use tooth eruption patterns, hormonal levels or telomere length analysis but it seems they’ve already decided on the most unsuitable solution available to them…)*
Isn’t this going to be quite hard? People develop at different rates and without the hard signs of aging that older people get, there’s less to go on.
I’ve seen 21 year olds that look like 15 year olds and vice versa.
If you don’t support this sensible measure then you’re in the side of Jimmy Savile. Can’t say it simpler than that
Will it even help the issue? Surely immigrants have the same data protection rights, specifically the right to challenge an automated decision?
> According to the tender, work shall begin on the algorithm on January 19, 2026, with completion expected on the same day, three years later.
This can’t be right, right? I read the contract, but couldn’t see any details about the algorithm or contest.
Edit: Even the supposed attached quote from the contract on the article doesn’t appear with a search.
so everyone with a high position in and around the government just thinks computers are actually magic right? this isn’t a task you can magically solve with computer vision and AI
That’s pretty much the stupidest thing I’ve read today.
I say saw them in half and count the rings.
/s
Got an email from XBox saying that if I didn’t confirm my age then I would lose access to social functions.
I guess they really do know nothing about me if they thought that was a threat.
Why these checks are per website and not just once via the browser is beyond me
There was a website about 2016-ish that guessed your age. It was sometimes spookily accurate .. and sometimes not. I think it was created by Microsoft. Unfortunately I don’t remember the link.
It was based on CNNs, an image oriented neural net architecture popular back them.
Does it have to accurately guess your age? Because let’s be honest if the question isn’t clear you could just submit a random number generator that gives an age to the day.
Is it correct? No. But you didn’t ask for that did you kier.
Well, they could start with: have you had this account for more than 18 years?
In that case you’re over 18 years old.