Age Verification through Behavior Biometrics

Child well-being and safety on the internet has been a massive topic of discussion for the past twenty years or so, we have noticed way too many (one is already too many) cases of children getting hurt on so many levels because of encounters that they had on the internet, that getting mechanisms to protect them has to be a priority and the gaming industry is not free of responsibility on this matter.

Age verification is of the utmost importance because it is vital that we protect children from other players, especially older ones, and in order to do that we must first have to know their actual age so, let’s talk about it and try to understand how it can as a way to protect children on video games. It is important not only to protect children from people that can harm them but also from content that they are not supposed to see until a certain age, besides that, it is also an important formula for you to always comply with the latest regulations and laws.

Now let’s focus on the gaming industry and the gigantic amount of types of games and the amount of content that people are exposed to. As this industry’s profits grow, so does the number of ways to bypass the security of video games grow as well. It is elementary to bypass some of the security systems (regarding identity) of video games and everyone can be whoever they want on the internet and that can be particularly harmful to both customer and provider. There is the problem of anonymity and the easiness that people have in creating multiple accounts so that they can obtain the most profit through multiple schemes and of course when it involves money and money transfers, children cannot have the possibility of doing such activities as they are minors and shouldn’t be able to do that.

Nonetheless, as these money problems are serious and need attendance, I will focus on an even bigger issue that I introduced at the beginning of this post, which is the one of age verification to protect children from harmful content and people. Video game studios are having a difficult time with this issue, first of all, they do try to protect children from harmful content by placing a form for each player to indicate their age, and those forms are very easy to lie in, it is from general knowledge that there is a high percentage of gamers that have lied in those forms especially to play videogames that required the player to be 18 or plus and the player was less than 18. Regarding this, studios have to decide between easy access to their game with these simple forms and a more robust system that will make their game more complicated to access and that, can possibly mean fewer gamers or losing gamers to the competition. Let’s focus on a technology that can help the videogame studios to find balance, a way for studios to have reliable information about the age of their gamers so that they can react on if said gamer should be able to see said and play said content or no, a way for the studios to have all the tools to protect children in a better way.

The top-notch technology that we want to talk about is behavioral biometrics. What is it? It is the gathering of data through the recording of human patterns while they play an activity. I can give you the example of Anybrain’s anti-cheat solution: we gather the way that a person uses a pc mouse and keyboard or a console controller and then our AI generates a biometric profile that is unique for each individual and then we use and monitor that profile if a player uses a cheat his behavior playing the game will change, will differ from the biometric profile and we can flag that player as a potential cheater. As you can see this is a high-tech that can help with amazing accuracy to catch cheaters but what if we could use behavioral biometrics to verify age?

It can be tricky to think of a way that this could work, my first train of thought before joining Anybrain was, how through only reading the interaction between human and machine one could guess the age of the user? Like, do people from different ages type differently than others? Well, it is just like that! For example, a biometric profile can be constructed by reading such data as the inclination of the smartphone when a person is using it, the speed of writing text, fingertip size, pressure on the screen, and then the ones that we at Anybrain use for the anti-cheat solution, mouse movement, the pressure and how hard a person presses the keyboard and also keystroke rhythm. So, if you start to think about it, it makes perfect sense that we could do age verification with this behavioral biometrics, combined with the ways that we (as an industry) have done that verification will ensure a more accurate age verification and further protection of children against bad people and harmful content.

Behavioral biometrics is the next big thing for ensuring security on the internet, it is accurate, it is very difficult to bypass and when it will be fully operational and with a low margin of error it will be one of the most important features for all sorts of industries.

We at Anybrain continue to work towards this, our AI is getting improved as you read this article and we hope to have a feature of age verification with a low margin of error in the near future as our CEO, André Pimenta, can tell you:

“Safety and security are two very important topics when we talk about digital worlds, especially when we have no way to protect children from the increase of risks and that is why we have been working to develop solutions that help minimize this risk. We are becoming increasingly digital and we have to realize that the way of interacting is different in digital worlds, such as video games, and that is why we have to pay more and more attention to these issues. It is difficult for an adult to understand what is on the other side in these environments, for a child it is even more difficult…”