LONDON: Age-detection systems powered by artificial intelligence that are used to screen migrants arriving in Britain use flawed and racialized models, rights groups and charities have warned.
The facial age-estimation technology risks endangering children, they said, warning that Black children, including from Sudan and Somalia, risk being placed into the adult system.
One charity, Humans for Rights Network, has worked with hundreds of children who were wrongly filtered into the adult system through human assessments by immigration officers.
Last year, 755 children were incorrectly categorized as adults upon arrival in the UK, according to Home Office figures.
Despite the use of cutting-edge technology, even the best systems can produce a 30-month margin of error in age estimation, the government has admitted.
Maddie Harris of the Humans for Rights Network said: “As soon as a child is treated as an adult, they are susceptible to — or exposed, rather — to any of the egregious consequences that the Home Office is applying to adults, such as detention and removal.”
The government this year announced a contract to use facial age-estimation technology produced by German company Cognitec.
The Home Office intends to use it to bolster manual checks by immigration officers. A spokesperson said: “Age assessments are a vital tool in maintaining border security. As part of our work to make this process more robust and consistent, we are exploring cutting-edge AI technology to verify migrants’ ages.”
Petra Molnar, co-founder of advocacy group Migration and Tech Monitor, compared the use of age-estimation technology to phrenology, “the study of skulls and skull shapes” by colonial-era scientists to delineate ethnic groups.
She said: “The context really matters here. We know that trauma ages you. We know that malnutrition, dehydration, torture — even just the journey itself — has physical impacts on your face, on your body.
“It’s effectively ‘neo-phrenology’ by categorizing people based on physical features. Relying on these kind of imperfect tools is not the solution.”
