Tencent Games announces today to upgrade protection measures for minors. Considering that some teenagers might use their parents' information to bypass the regulation on the basis of gaming-time limits, in-game purchase regulations, and gaming curfew set for minors, Tencent adopts face recognition to identify underage users in two scenarios, including game login and payment. 

Additionally, Tencent says that this measure has been piloted the games of Glory of Kings and Game For Peace, and has been implemented in the vast majority of Tencent's mobile games recently. In the future, all of its mobile games will introduce this technology.

Protecting of underage users has always been one of the critical issues. Despite some efforts at the national level, there has been a lack of standardized guidelines concerning protection. Thus, face-recognition verification has been proposed for real-name verification. However, since there is neither unified national specification and security standard nor mature technology and experience for reference, the technology would probably bring risks such as potential privacy invasion and abuse and other hidden dangers.

Will Tencent's action promotes the growth of face-recognition technology in the gaming industry? The question is yet to be answered.