UK govt considering facial recognition to verify age of online users | Hacker News Reader

UK govt considering facial recognition to verify age of online users

theregister.co.uk

43 pointsrahuldottech17 comments

Not even a week after they conceded that their previous such effort was a failure. [0]

I recall reading somewhere that the reason for all this nonsense (don't forget this stuff too [1]) may be that the Conservative Party still wants to score points with their ultra-conservative base after legalising gay marriage.

I have no doubt that the upshot of this latest effort will be just like the last time: wasting a few million pounds of tax funds, and online mockery.

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/16/age_verification_po...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/dec/...

It's likely not a serious proposal; possibly more aimed at shifting people's perception of what's reasonable towards a 'more moderate' solution that would previously have been considered unacceptable.

Common technique: have someone not too senior (or retired) propose something outrageous, then introduce what was really planned all along and present it as a compromise.

>more aimed at shifting people's perception of what's reasonable towards a 'more moderate' solution that would previously have been considered unacceptable.

Playing with the Overton window [0], then. Interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window.

It's important to know that the UK government currently has a majority of around -40. Which means there's going to be an election sooner or later and no legislation can pass. This allows them to announce and pursue popular policy without any intention of fulfilling their promises - since they can't pass their legislation now, and they won't need to answer for their policies for 5 years if they win an election.

> ultra-conservative base

Surely ultra (anything) base is an oxymoron?

Not in this case because the word base here does not refer to a "standard" level of which ultraX would be the opposite, but rather refers to a group of people who support a particular political party.

There's nothing oxymoronic about the idea that people with extreme views form the core support of a candidate or party.

Facial recognition is almost universally trivial to defeat as an authentication mechanism. A colleague had a Microsoft Surface with facial unlock. I could hold up my phone to the camera, with his Slack profile picture fullscreen, and it would unlock.

But how easy would it be to defeat as an identification mechanism in public areas when used for widespread surveillance? That's the real aim of facial recognition for governments I think.

https://cvdazzle.com/

The MP who said this, Nicky Morgan, has a less than stellar reputation. Sounds like the comment was purely a case of throwing out a buzzword as a terrible answer to a good question.

The minute any implementation of this hit the real world it'd fail. Teenagers are very good at working around technology, whilst anyone other than the average caucasian is likely to get an incorrect age assessment.

>The MP who said this, Nicky Morgan, has a less than stellar reputation.

Based on the Wikipedia article her career has been one long series of blunders.

In the current government, that’s a prerequisite. PM himself sets the tone.

I presume they expect to do this by means of webcams or uploaded photographs. What’s to prevent somebody holding up an enlarged photograph or sending a JPEG of Uncle Pete?

Chrome actually makes this easy. It has a literal option "--use-file-for-fake-video-capture" which does what it says. https://webrtc.org/testing/

This isn't a serious proposal it's just incoherent ramblings of somebody who doesn't know what they are talking about.

So either identifying individuals based on a national database mapped against profile and age (privacy nightmare), or guessing age based on looks using a janky ML model (very error prone).

What could possibly go wrong...

Taking their cues from China now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com