BorderAge promises 100% anonymous age assurance with hand gesture modality

Imagine a magician who waves their hands not to conjure a white rabbit, but to provide age assurance without collecting a single iota of personal identity information.

It sounds a bit like a magic trick – until you see it in action. BorderAge is a new age assurance startup that offers a novel approach to biometric data analysis. It uses hand gestures to determine whether or not a user is over a certain age threshold.

The process draws on medical studies that show variations among people of different ages in the duration and distance of “rapid aimed limb movements toward a visible target region.” Which is to say, people’s muscles and bones develop and age in certain ways that affect how quickly and thoroughly they perform certain gestures.

These can be tested against a simple user interface to ballpark how old someone is.

Jean-Michel Polit, an executive for the firm based in Montpelier, France, explains that “the reason behind this is the fact that from the time we were born until adulthood, our nervous system changes pretty much every day. And as it changes, we make some movements ever slightly differently with time.”

Falling into the category of age estimation, BorderAge’s checks require no personal data or metadata, no identity documents, and no email, making them “100 percent anonymous.”

The technology has been rated at 99 percent accurate by the Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS), and its cost per transaction is comparable to online age verification that uses face biometrics or document scans.

A demo that Polit provided to Biometric Update shows how the app has been designed with additional safeguards, so that, for instance, the camera stops functioning if it detects a face in the frame.

In short, it sounds like something any decent pornographer grappling with age assurance legislation would want to get their hands on.

Adult content sites keen on age assurance that doesn’t need faces

Polit confirms that several adult sites have been eager to learn more about BorderAge – and drops a hard truth about why.

“The reason why adult platforms don’t want to implement solutions to date is not because they care about the First Amendment,” he says. “It’s because when they implement the existing solutions so far, they lose almost all their visitors. I’m in contact with a company that used to have 15 million visitors per month and went down to 200,000” after age checks were implemented.

People simply don’t want their face biometrics or ID documents associated in any way, shape or form with porn. And, Polit says, “I’m not here to badmouth competition, but the truth is that solutions to date all require, in some way, shape, or form, the collection of personal data.”

“Even if they promise to erase the data right away, in the minds of many people, there’s always a suspicion that this data will be hacked in some way and used by ill-intentioned organizations.”

The hand gesture technology, Polit says, “kills the First Amendment argument” against age verification, which says adults should not have to provide personally identifiable information to access material they are legally entitled to view.

“And second, and maybe more importantly, because users won’t fear that if they use the solution, they have the risk of their personal data being shared on the web, they’ll be more accepting of these solutions, and therefore platforms will use them and the kids will be protected.”

It boils down to the same thing: a tool that can gauge whether someone is old enough to access online content without having to know anything about who they are. BorderAge is still developing its brand and corporate identity, and it is working on a token-based implementation that would allow a verified age check to live on a user’s device and work across applicable platforms.

But the basic idea is as elegant as it is simple: age assurance that requires nothing but the wave of a hand.

Article Topics

age verification  |  biometric age estimation  |  biometrics  |  BorderAge  |  data privacy  |  data protection  |  gesture recognition  |  hand biometrics  |  startup