According to a post by Zach Bussey, Twitch is planning on implementing "facial age estimation technology" to ensure that the account's user is of the age they claim to be. There are many reasons to go against this, like security of the pictures or videos used, preventing false claims like people claiming to be a famous celebrity to evade age regulations, amongst others, but for me personally it's the limitations of these algorithmic based systems on people like me who look much younger than my written age. I'm in my late 20s but a few months ago when picking up something for a client, I was questioned if I was even old enough to drive. In a previous instance, I was struck with a temporary ban on TikTok because they assumed someone under the age of 13 was livestreaming when it was just me in a onesie in my early to mid 20s. It's partly why I switched to Twitch and use a vtuber model in the first place - to reduce the chances of bans for trying to stream because people misconstrue my appearance as younger than I actually am.

As I mentioned earlier, another concern is storing data of our faces. If a data leak happens again, there is now a face with the account information (in theory). If the streamer or chatter never showed their face on Twitch, using this form of age verification becomes a liability for them. It's even more important for vtubers who limit exposure of their physical appearance, or for those trying to evade stalkers, abusers, or domestic violence. It takes one malicious person to take a data leak of that high a significance to make it seriously dangerous for those using the platform.

My other point is that people might try to evade the system by using another person's face for age verification. We've already seen this happen in other platforms like YouTube where people tried to get around picture based age verification by using either video game characters or pictures of famous people. This undermines the actual purpose of the age verification method (ensuring minors do not interact with adult content). Some adults might do this because they don't want to have their face be used for age verification, and so will kids who think they are mature enough to be a part of the adult club. Because of this, some platforms have gone and done more extreme measures of ensuring age regulations are met, like YouTube's use of AI monitoring of watched content. With Twitch's set up, that extreme measure would be hard to implement, so you'll probably have to prune anyone using video game characters, famous people, or stock photo people as means to bypass the "facial age estimation technology" limitations. That brings up the issue of actual famous people or the actors/actresses that do stream on Twitch who would use their actual face for verification. You'd have to do additional monitoring/moderation to ensure that you are only pruning those that are using someone else's face, which adds more work to the moderation or security teams. It'll be more work overall to use this system.

I hope these points help to illustrate the issues this technology might cause. Please reconsider the usage of "facial age estimation technology" to guess a person's age.