In a bid to stop staff from having to manually verify alcohol sales on self-checkout machines, a supermarket camera age verification trial that can assess your age has been introduced to major supermarkets.

Asda, Co-op and Morrisons are taking part in the Home Office trial. If a customer consents to it, the camera will send images to algorithms working against a database of anonymous faces to establish an estimated age of the customer.

If the algorithm decides you look under 25 – you can enjoy a moment of perceived youthful victory – before having to go through the normal ID process with a member of staff. Otherwise, you can buy your alcohol on the spot and start wondering when you began looking older than 25.

“Waiting for age approval at the self-checkout is sometimes frustrating for shoppers,” Robin Tombs, chief executive of Yoti, the company providing the technology, said.

He added: “Our age-verification solutions are helping retailers like Asda meet the requirements of regulators worldwide and keep pace with consumer demands for fast and convenient services, while preserving people’s privacy.”

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Yoti was also keen to stress that the system doesn’t hold on to any images it captures and the technology isn’t facial recognition as the system isn’t ‘searching’ for your actual face in a database and parsing data on you based on that.

Before being rolled out, the algorithm was tested on 125,000 people aged between six to 60 – being able to guess participants ages within a margin of error of 2.2 years, with even higher accuracy among 16-20 year olds.