Nine U.S. Lawmakers Propose Facial Age Verification Bill for Online Sports Betting and Prediction Markets

According to Odaily, U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer and eight co-sponsors introduced bipartisan legislation requiring online sports betting platforms and prediction markets to verify users' ages via facial recognition before login, betting, or trading. The bill, titled Facial Recognition to Protect Children Act, uses facial structure and pattern analysis to estimate user age without storing identity or biometric data.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) classifies age estimation as facial analysis rather than identification. In NIST evaluations of six age estimation algorithms on visa photo databases, the average margin of error was 3.1 years, varying by image quality, age, gender, and geographic region.