Coalition Urges UK Government to Halt Facial Age Estimation for Asylum Seekers

• The EFF, Human Rights Watch, Foxglove, and 60 other organizations have called on the UK government to abandon plans to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) technology for asylum-seeking children.
• The coalition demands transparency and a response from the Home Office regarding the legal and ethical implications of the program, which is scheduled for 2027.

Core Concerns

• Discrimination: FAE technology exhibits significant bias, often underperforming for people of color and women while showing higher accuracy only for Eastern European men. The Home Office has acknowledged that performance varies by ethnicity and skin tone.
• Inaccuracy: The Home Office admits that top-tier FAE systems have an error margin of approximately 2.5 years for 16-to-18-year-olds—the specific group targeted by the deployment. This margin is expected to widen due to trauma-induced physical changes in many asylum seekers.
• Data Privacy and Legality: There are unresolved questions regarding the legal basis for collecting and processing sensitive data from minors, as well as the nature of the datasets used to train these AI models.
• Transparency: Despite government claims of "promising performance" based on internal testing, no Equality or Data Protection Impact Assessments have been published to support these assertions.

Next Steps

• The coalition has issued a 21-day deadline for the Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, to provide public transparency and address these critical concerns.