the example of supermarkets in Great Britain

Soon terminals to check the age of players at tobacconists? La Française des Jeux tested software for analyzing the faces of players for three months at tobacconists, evaluating whether they are of age or not, announced a manager of the start-up Yoti, on the occasion of the International Forum of cybersecurity. To be able to play, young customers had the option of presenting their identity card or having their face scanned at a terminal installed in the shop.

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Artificial intelligence was developed by Yoti, a world leader in this booming sector. The company, which has trained artificial intelligence on millions of faces, says it determines age with an accuracy of 1.6 years.

Major British brands leaving

This solution, which is based on the analysis of anonymized facial pixels and whose photos are not stored, is a first in France. It has already been tested in the United Kingdom, in hypermarkets for the purchase of alcohol, in particular. The customer presents himself at the checkout with bottles of beer or whiskey in a store: a camera then scans his face and, if facial recognition shows him to be 25 years old or younger, he must present an identity document to justify that he is over 18, the legal age in the UK to buy alcohol.

This quick two-second process reduces the frequency of checks – normally compulsory – carried out by employees, as this video of Yoti shows, during an experiment in Estonia, this time.

This experiment was carried out last year in Tesco, Asda, Co-op and Morrisons supermarkets. So many major retailers who find these tests convincing, to the point of saying they are ready to support a law authorizing the generalization of this process.

However, the Ministry of the Interior has not given the green light and no text has yet been submitted to the legislator. Experts warn against the risks of such large-scale technology, speaking of a shift towards a state of surveillance thanks to high technology.