Svmuu News: U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer and eight co-sponsors have introduced a bipartisan bill requiring online sports betting platforms and prediction markets to verify users’ ages before they log in, place bets, or make transactions. The bill, titled the Facial Recognition to Protect Children Act, applies to online gambling and prediction markets.
Gottheimer’s office stated that the relevant technology will read facial structures and patterns to estimate a user’s age and will not store identity or personal biometric information. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) classifies age estimation as facial analysis rather than identity recognition.
NIST previously evaluated six age estimation algorithms, which had an average error of 3.1 years when tested on the same database of visa photos; performance varied depending on factors such as image quality, age, gender, and region of birth. The full text and number of the bill have not yet been made public, and the enforcement agency, penalties, technical standards, and appeal mechanisms have not yet been specified.