Biometrics emerge as key solution for gaming industry’s verification challenges

Biometric technology is seen as a solution for the gaming industry to robustly verify players’ identities and ages while providing a seamless customer experience.

The suggestion comes from a webinar by Innovative Technology and iGB, which have recently partnered to offer operators a blueprint for using biometrics to tackle customer verification challenges.

Andrew O’Brien, product manager of biometrics and identity at Innovative Technology, opened the webinar by examining some use cases of biometric technology for gaming. These include the implementation of anonymous age estimation, the identification of vulnerable players, the matching of users’ photos with images on IDs, and the delivery of customized advertisements.

To achieve these goals, O’Brien says it is necessary to overcome a number of barriers, including the reduction of gender and demographic biases, addressing data privacy and transparency concerns, making biometric systems resilient to spoofing attacks and dealing with internet connectivity issues related to the deployment of cloud solutions.

According to Fiona Hughes, head of compliance and legal at Aspire Global, the key to deploying these technologies lies in working with companies that have exposure and success with biometrics within other industries.

From a regulatory standpoint, UK Gambling Business CEO Peter Hannibal says that there has been a conflict concerning data regulation, including biometrics, in the country, because of differences between GDPR and gambling regulations.

Hannibal adds that some of these conflicts have now been resolved, but since biometrics are ‘special category’ data, the capture and handling of it requires substantial compliance efforts.

At the same time, O’Brien says he believes that the data captured by Innovative Technology’s anonymous age estimation technology should not fall under this category, as no data is ever stored during the face scanning process, and the system does not perform facial mapping.

To reduce customer friction, Peter Murray, head of gaming at Veriff, says that making data handling policies transparent would go a long way in encouraging consumers to adopt biometrics in the gaming field.

The panel also discussed biometric spoofing, with Tony Allen, CEO of the Age Check Certification Scheme, saying presentation attack detection (PAD) technology has been quite successful so far.

Biometric biases were also mentioned in the webinar, with the panelists agreeing that while some issues remain, algorithms have gotten increasingly better at identifying individuals from different ethnicities. Allen, in particular, believes that non-ideal lighting conditions remain the main struggle for face biometrics algorithms.

For more information about each of these talking points, a recording of the webinar is available here.

The session comes months after data by Incode Technologies suggested facial recognition is already minimizing fraud and identity theft in online gaming.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometrics  |  data privacy  |  face biometrics  |  gambling  |  gaming  |  identity verification  |  Innovative Technology  |  regulation