Deakin Uni facial scanning technology aims to stop kids looking at porn
January 24, 2008 – 11:38 amMelbourne?s Deakin University is developing facial scanning hardware that could provide an immediate estimation of a computer user’s age by examining facial features.
The researchers told News Ltd:
Automatic estimations of someone?s age could be used in software to stop young internet users accessing pornography, to provide an alternative to fingerprint scanning and help police in the identification of suspects.
?In extensive experiments of over 2000 faces, our method outperformed the existing approaches,? Prof Smith-Miles said.
Of course, anyone aged between 15 and 25 is likely to be misjudged by such technology. It would be a case of older looking 14 year olds watching hardcore lesbian action, and fresh looking 23 year olds confined to Disney.com. Heck, someone like Rove Mcmanus would likely have to settle for quick peeks at Bras ‘n’ Things catalogues.
The technology is interesting, but an efficient method of restricting access to pornography, hardly. Where this type of tech becomes a serious concern is in public settings. Imagine if libraries or Internet cafes were forced to roll out this sort of equipment.
One Response to “Deakin Uni facial scanning technology aims to stop kids looking at porn”
Of course these facial recognition systems are easy to defeated simply by printing out a picture of a face and holding it to the camera.
In addition it relies on other technology for knowing what is porn, monitoring what the user is looking at and actually blocking it. Most of that stuff has serious problems anyway and can be bypassed with encrypted proxies.
I don’t think public places would use this technology, since they would be blocking porn for everyone regardless of age. They might use similar tech to check who your are for billing purposes, or even market research however as an alternative to a normal username/password but I think its unlikely.
More of a problem will be regular security systems hooked up to a system that knows who you are and what computer your using and can monitor it, and companies that pool this data so if you visit a cybercafe across town it still knows you from that other one you frequent.
By EbilPhish on Jan 24, 2008