The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed

Rights group warns against UK facial age estimation plans for asylum process

Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the UK Home Office on Friday to abandon its 2027 plans to use facial age estimation (FAE) AI to assess young asylum seekers, warning that the technology risks discriminatory errors and sets a dangerous global precedent for migration policy. In an open letter to the UK Home Office, HRW, Foxglove, and 61 civil society groups raised substantial concerns about the discrimination in FAE, particularly in relation to wome…

The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed

Tests of age-verification technology show the risks of life-altering errors.

The UK’s Discriminatory AI Experiment on Child Refugees

Click to expand Image Migrants walk towards a bus to be taken for processing after disembarking from a Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) lifeboat on a beach after crossing the English Channel, in Dungeness, England, on June 15, 2022. © 2022 Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images The UK Home Office is pushing ahead with plans to use AI technology to guess the age of young people arriving at UK borders to seek asylum, starting in 2027. Yet the…