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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Here's what you want to know:

https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/kids-web-services/pv-service/...

> Parents in all regions except the USA and the Republic of Korea can verify their age using face scan. KWS prompts the parent to hold their device in front of their face. A machine-learning algorithm estimates the parent’s age using the device’s camera.

> Face scan verification is provided by Yoti (yoti.com).

They have an app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yoti.mobil...

I installed it but there's no direct interface - it needs to be opened via some intent and I can't be bothered to figure that out.

I would put a lot of money on it not being able to detect you pointing your phone at a Veo3 video of an old person though. Maybe on iPhones where you reliably have a depth camera? Doubtful on Android though.

It only takes one smart kid to beat this, and there are plenty of those.

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> I would put a lot of money on it not being able to detect you pointing your phone at a Veo3 video of an old person though.

I recently had to verify my identity for UK government company registration purposes.

I had to use my phone to scan my biometric passport, then it did facial recognition while flashing the screen between red, green and blue. Presumably doing... something... hoping to detect fake faces.

(as well as the biometric passport and modern phone, it also needed an e-mail address, password, TOTP code, verifying the e-mail address, full name and address, and year I moved into the address, and I had to log in about 5 times...)

> Presumably doing... something... hoping to detect fake faces.

I'd assume they were checking that your face reflected the light properly. If you were using a fake face on another screen being held up to the camera, it'd be more emissive than reflective.

> flashing the screen between red, green and blue

Ah that's actually pretty clever. It'll detect reflective surfaces instead of emissive ones. Still possible to defeat but significantly harder. I imagine there are still some smart kids that could do it. Definitely fewer though.

Can't speak about this one in particular, but the face scans for banking that I know of also includes liveness checks to avoid AI impersonation (and presumably dead bodies).

What kind of liveness checks?

The app asks you to move the camera or change your expression throughout the verification.

I'm not familiar with how it works on the implementation side. A ML conference that I attended had a presenter working on this area and beating AI impersonation was their #1 priority (along with other trivial approaches).

For what it's worth, this might also be just a security theater from the banks, though.

> The app asks you to move the camera or change your expression throughout the verification.

The Natwest app will sometimes ask you to say words / numbers when doing a verification for e.g. a large transfer. Probably beatable by decent OCR feeding into voice synthesis with facial animation though (they don't have voice prints to check against that I'm aware of but even if they did...)

This will be a lot of fun. I regularly get clocked as being a teenager, despite not being one for a long time. I've been kicked out of bars, get carded buying cough medicine, etc. If I'm lucky, the only thing that gets me out of those situations is my government ID with my birthday on it.

Something tells me people who don't look exactly their age are going to get caught up in these automated systems.

> Something tells me people who don't look exactly their age are going to get caught up in these automated systems.

But then you just verify with a different method like government ID or credit card.

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