Five of the UK’s biggest supermarkets are to trial facial age estimation technology for customers purchasing Challenge 25 products.
Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi and the Co-op are to test the technology, developed by Yoti, which accurately guesses a customer’s age when purchasing products such like alcohol.
The technology is being trialled in Aldi’s first Shop&Go store, which debuts in Greenwich from today.
According to the developer, it has created the “worlds most accurate age estimation technology”, by training its AI-powered algorithm to check faces with an average accuracy of 2.2 years.
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The figure then increases to 1.5 years amongst those ages between 16 and 20.
The age estimating technology will be built into supermarkets self-service checkouts and will take photos of consenting customer’s faces for the analysis before deleting them once the process has been completed and the age has been verified.
Yoti revealed that the only data that is shared with the retailer is the age check and that no human will ever see the photo. However, an employee will see the the photo during the trial to see the standard forms of identification.
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