More than 60 groups tell Home Office to stop using racist and faulty AI facial age estimation tech on asylum-seeking children
Over sixty groups, including Human Rights Watch and Foxglove, have called on the UK Government to immediately halt plans to use experimental AI facial age estimation (FAE) technology on vulnerable children at the UK border.
The government announced last month that the Home Office would introduce AI facial age estimation tests at the British border from 2027, in order to identify adult asylum seekers “attempting to game the system” by pretending to be children.
FAE software has been widely reported to return defective, unfair and discriminatory results, particularly for people who aren’t white. The Home Office has admitted: “FAE performance can vary depending on ethnicity” and skin tone.
The Home Office has also previously admitted that FAE has serious problems with accurately estimating age in the 16-to-18-year-old range. They admit that even the “top systems” have an “error margin of around 2.5 years” in this area. This is a particular concern given the specific goal of this programme is to differentiate between adults and children.
It is difficult to see how the Home Office can have any confidence in a tool that is unable to routinely and accurately distinguish between the faces of adults and children when the tech has repeatedly proven unable to identify the face of a 16-year old, a child in the eyes of the law, from a 18-year old, the legal age of majority in the UK.
Add to that the repeated racist bias of these tools in produce faulty outcomes, ageing up the faces of people from sub-Saharan Africa in particular, and you have a recipe for vulnerable children seeking asylum on our shores facing a serious threat to their safety at the hands of the Home Office.
The groups warn that that Home Office use of these FAE tools could pose “a serious threat” to the rights of asylum-seeking children, who it describes as “a uniquely vulnerable population”.
The letter also raises urgent questions about how the data of vulnerable children was collected by the Home Office, or its commercial partners, for training this software.
It is unclear how, and under what lawful basis, the Home Office, or a third-party supplying the FAE software, could have sought consent for the collection and processing of photographs or data from asylum-seeking children to train this system.
The open letter has asked the Home Office to provide the full details of how it gained its data for training this system – and of how the collection was lawful.
Hit the button below to read the open letter, signed by 62 groups, in full:
Foxglove co-executive director Martha Dark said: “It is shocking that the Government is experimenting with dangerously inaccurate ‘AI’ tools on children seeking safety.
“Errors by these tools could have serious consequences: vulnerable children being forced, alone, into adult detention centres.
“The Government’s own internal documents show that they know the huge problems these tools have. They are faulty, routinely mistaking children for adults. And they are racist – showing particular problemswith accuracy when they are trialled on people from countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Children seeking asylum have often suffered unimaginable trauma. They should not be the test subjects for experimental tech that has baked-in inaccuracy and racist bias. Nor should their rights be sacrificed by a government determined to show how tough it is on refugees. We, along with 61 other organisations, are calling on the Government to immediately halt the implementation of this tool.”
Anna Bacciarelli, Senior AI Researcher at Human Rights Watch, said:
“The government needs to scrap these plans. Rolling out this experimental technology in such a critical and high-stakes use case is simply too risky, and creates myriad new ways to harm vulnerable young people seeking refuge.
“The Home Office is pitching this as a cutting-edge solution to magically resolve complex migration issues, but the Home Office’s own trials found the system to be flawed and discriminatory in its test phase. There is simply no way to move ahead with this safely and legally.
“The UK is globally influential in terms of both migration policy and government tech adoption, so this plan could impact child refugees far beyond UK shores. Rights groups across the UK agree that the government should urgently reconsider these plans.”
NOTES TO EDITORS
The UK government’s announcement of this system: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/facial-age-estimation/facial-age-estimation-using-ai-to-support-initial-age-decisions-a-guide-accessible
Coverage of this system by the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3pe36qe7ro
The petition page supporting the open letter is housed on 38 Degrees’ website: https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-the-home-office-using-experimental-ai-on-asylum-seeking-children