This week, EFF joined Foxglove, Human Rights Watch, and 60 other organizations in
writing to
the UK’s Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, raising serious concern about the Home Office’s
decision
to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) to assess asylum-seeking children from 2027.
The letter points to four key concerns:
Discrimination
As with most face estimation and recognition tools, there is ongoing bias in the deployment of these technologies. With FAE,
many have highlighted
its baked-in failures and discrimination, particularly in relation to women and people of color. Evidence shows that FAE is most accurate for estimating the ages of Eastern European men, but even then it consistently produces errors. The Home Office
itself
noted “that FAE performance can vary depending on ethnicity” and skin tone.
Inaccuracy
The Home Office has
admitted
that FAE systems are imprecise for analyzing 16-to 18-year-olds, with even the “top systems” having an “error margin of around 2.5 years here.” This is exactly the age range for which the Home Office has chosen to deploy this technology. And this error margin will be widened yet further because children seeking asylum often suffer from trauma-induced aging.
Lawfulness of Use of Children’s Data
Major concerns exist around the lawful basis on which the Home Office, or its chosen third-party FAE vendors, could have sought consent to collect and process photographs or data from asylum-seeking children to train this system. Further, there is no clarity on the images and/or data that this technology has been trained on.
Lack of Necessary Disclosure
The Home Office claims “extensive testing has already been carried out across diverse groups, including different ethnicities, genders and age ranges, indicating promising performance and accuracy.” But these purported “promising” results have not been published, nor have any Equality or Data Protection Impact Assessments.
The
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